By Bill Petridis — relevant at 8/10/2018

Twitter: @bpetridis

Note: I am not a Travala employee. I am just an active community member. Information in this guide was a personal experience that I wanted to share, and opinions are my own. They should not be used as investment advice.

What is Travala/AVA

Travala is a decentralised Travel booking platform that leverages the power of the NEO blockchain and a zero-commission business model to provide cheap, seamless and safe hotel bookings.

The marketplace has been live for a few months now and runs as a DApp on NEO. Travala covers 30 countries right now and aims to be wordlwide as soon as possible — Click here for a map.

Why I wrote this review — Concept is still a baby

The little man

I wanted to share with you my experience using the marketplace to do a ski trip and how it went. Travala and the concept of booking travel via block-chain is about as new as my son so I’m sure there is a lot of people that may be wondering does this stuff actually work?

Review

We’ve had a bumper ski season in Australia this year. YES we actually get snow here 😊, it’s usually not very good, but this year it was awesome!! This was music to my ears as a long-time skier I was itching to get to the snow and my ability to whizz over to New Zealand or the USA got nuked when the little guy above came along.

After a big dump of snow at the ski field near Melbourne where I live and some pleading with my partner, I jumped on the Travala marketplace and did a search for Mansfield Victoria. For those who aren’t familiar with Mt Buller, this is the town at the bottom. I’ve done this trip a million times and when I ski I do it on the cheap so was happy to find my trusty mainstay property listed there as it’s a small town and there aren’t many accommodation options. I compared the price to Expedia and it was $19 a night cheaper for what is normally a $130 a night room during the peak season. Peak season is whenever, by some miracle, Australia gets good snow.

Anyways, jumped on https://www.travala.com/

Searched for a property

Chose the dates which was the next day for a couple nights

Chose a property

Clicked book on the room I wanted

Signed in, entered the name of the guests — I took a friend

Clicked book

Chose AVA as the payment option (this is the native Travala token. I already have some of these if you don’t there is a link at the bottom about how to buy them until Credit Card and Other Crypto exchanges are made available.)

At the end of the whole process I got a public address with the number of tokens I needed to send. You get ten minutes to complete that task

Payment Prompt

So, jumped into 03 Wallet and sent them — Link at the bottom.

I got an email soon after confirming my booking

Booking confirmation

One thing I have noticed on the Marketplace is that the availability of property does change seasonally. It’s taken me a while to write this review (see baby above) and I noticed today that there are less properties available in the Australian Snow country than when I booked. However, there are more where it is Sunny. Guess this is a seasonal demand driven thing, but I’m no expert.

So on to the trip. I rang my buddy, packed up my Lambo and we got going.

Lambo next year

Check in was easy, wasn’t sure what to expect, but it was the same as when you turn up after booking on something like Expedia. You basically get there, show them some ID and give a credit card for the mini-bar and you are done. I was so excited that it all went smoothly I decided to give the property owner’s cat a hug with a print out of the Travala tokens I bought during the ICO sale. My buddy took the picture. Suffice to say I think she thought I was crazy, and the cat was not impressed.

Upset Kitty

Anyways headed up the mountain in the morning and it was an absolute ripper of a day.

On the way up

Guy on the left is from NZ — it’s not his fault

Up the top

Headed down and had a very cultured dinner

Kebabs — with Culture!

Woke up and did a repeat then drove home. Great two days. Saved on my booking and FINALLY got to use a Crypto Currency for something fun. No complaints.

Overall I’m going to give the whole Travala experience two thumbs up

NEOkini— Full image for AVA holders only

Links