Manraj Rai ICO team member replied on 2 Jun 2018

Hi Vasily,



Thank you very much for your rating. Just to clarify, We are creating a marketplace for hotels to connect to, where customers will be able to book directly with these hotels thereby creating more transparency. We are positioning ourselves as a technology partner as opposed to an Online Travel Agent and we are also white-labeling hotel brands on our website and app.



With regards to your feedback, please see my responses below:



1) For a company like Booking.com to directly compete with us would mean they need to scale down their business tremendously. It is not feasible for them to do so seeing their revenue model is purely based on charging commissions to hotels (10-30%). For them to scale down their business to a level where they charge 0% commissions is simply not viable. They even charge hotels to show up higher on the search results (something GOeureka is not going to do. Instead, we will base hotel ranking on customer feedback and the amount of features that are provided to customers).



2) It is not going to be easy for hotels to accept crypto currency payments directly. Therefore, for bookings that are made via cryptocurrency, Goeureka will carry out the conversion from Crypto to Fiat and pay out the hotels (with no commissions charged). We will also be accepting payments via Credit cards and our GOT token. Any booking made via credit cards and other cryptocurrencies will be charged a 5% transaction fee. The benefit of using our token is that the customer will not be liable to pay the 5% transaction fee and will be able to access further discounts for hotel rooms that are connected to our platform.



3) The online booking industry is heavily dominated by Online Travel Agents (OTAs) such as Booking.com, Agoda etc. Hotels are not happy to be paying out such high commissions on a yearly basis to these OTAs. At the same time, while the OTAs do contribute to room bookings, they also make hotels sign (Rate-Parity) agreements where hotels are not allowed to display cheaper rates on their own website compared to what is being displayed on the OTA website. OTAs crawl websites of hotels every second to see if any hotel is advertising a cheaper rate. If the hotel does, they get penalised. One of the penalties is to demote the hotel to the bottom of the search results. Although Rate-Parity agreements have been outlawed in the EU, it is still very much in force in most places. OTAs will not be able to claim Rate- Parity on our platform as it is a 'Private Platform'.



Another factor is sharing of data. When a customer books a hotel via an OTA, only a limited amount of data is shared. What hotels are after is the customers email address so they can direct market to the customer in the future. The OTAs do not furnish this information which is a big problem because OTAs contribute between 40-70% of rooms bookings for hotels. Imagine if a hotel owner receives 70% of their bookings from an OTA and they don't have access to full information of 70% of customers who walk through their door?



Another point to note is the high commissions being charged by Online Travel Agents (OTAs) (anywhere from 10-30%). Prices of hotel rooms have increased because hotels need to factor these commissions into their room pricing structure.



While hotels are reliant on OTAs to offload inventory, they would phase them out given the opportunity. We are presenting this opportunity to the hotel industry and we have received a very positive response from the hotels we are dealing with.



Our token will be utilised to access discounts for hotel rooms on the GOeureka platform and to facilitate the interoperability of hotel loyalty rewards. Every hotel knows the fiat value of their loyalty reward point and we are working on a solution for customers to convert their existing hotel points to a fiat value (GO credits) and utilise these credits towards a room booking at another hotel on our platform.



We aim to launch a Co-Branded Debit card with an existing company within the blockchain space. We will make an announcement once we decide who we are going to partner with.



I hope i have clarified your concerns, if you would still like any further clarification. Please do not hesitate to let me or anyone else on my team know. Thank you



Kind Regards,



Manraj Rai



CEO/ Founder

GOeureka