After a long wait, we are finally announcing that the expected Summer release is completed. But what does that mean? Is the platform ready for hotels and travellers? What is missing and why? What is next? You will find out all of that information in this and a few follow up posts that we will be publishing here in a few days.

Show me what you’ve got

Let’s start with what is currently possible, after all, you can open up our Explorer and have a look. As a demonstration of the current state of the platform, we have prepared a fabricated set of data containing a few cozy hotels in Transylvania, Romania.

But any owner of a hotel can push their data into our platform (although not really by hand, that’s a bit too complex). Are you using any software for managing your hotel? Ask your vendor to integrate with Winding Tree right away! We would be more than delighted to help you with it.

For every hotel, we can currently keep track of basic information (such as address, contacts, description and images), room types that are available (again with description and images), and a list of rate plans (pricing information) applicable to a particular room type.

Rate plans can be defined in a very flexible way, so as a hotel owner you can experiment with discounts based on the number of guests, length of stay, or even on the age of every guest. As a traveller, you can fiddle with the trip parameters in the Explorer to see how they affect the resulting prices.

And that’s it.

Surely, you are joking

I can hear your angry voices, you expected a lot more. And I agree with you, that on the surface, it really does not look like much.

But consider this: All of this is public information that anyone can access. Winding Tree does not own any of the data. Winding Tree cannot delete any of the data. None of the data is actually on some Winding Tree server, we really have no control over that. Only the owners of the data can change it and they are not dependent on a platform owned by a third party.

All of the services we have deployed are for demonstration purposes only, and actually anyone in the world can run their own Read API, Write API or Explorer to read or write all of this publicly available data and build on it.

This has never been done before in the hotel industry.

Because we have spent a lot of time designing the whole infrastructure, we have decided to not include the information on availability in the Summer release. But it’s fairly easy to extend the whole thing and we will add support for availability in a few weeks. We just didn’t want to over-promise and delay the release.

Can it fly?

No, the platform is not ready for general use. And to actually make it usable in the real world, there’s still a lot of work on the infrastructure ahead of us. And of course, the important things on top of it like Booking and Payment have to get done.

But the first milestone was achieved in a successful way — we now know that we can actually build a working and usable decentralized marketplace for hotels. And we will not throw any of this away, but keep on building on top of that.

In the upcoming posts, I will get more technical and describe the whole platform design (which can actually be re-used for similar use cases) and all of the building blocks that are available as open-source software.

Thank you for your support and patience! If you have any questions, join our Telegram, technical discussion should go to our Google Group. If you want to contribute, a good place to start is GitHub or our upcoming hackathon!