Meet “Cool Cousin” – where travelers and locals are rewarded for engaging with each others!

The current state of the traveling industry

Who doesn’t love to travel? It is fair to say that traveling is one of the best pleasures there is in life. Discovering new and interesting cities, its culture, its food and its people. We are explorers by nature, and traveling is our modern way of satisfying this deep primitive need we have to discover and delight ourselves with new places.

Because of this intrinsic need of us, traveling is a multi trillion (yes, with a “t”) dollar industry ^Source, and therefore, it is incredibly lucrative for any business to be able to establish itself as a worthy place for tourists to go, visit, and spend their money on.

As time advances, technology always finds its way to increase its relevance in every part of the economy there is, and of course, traveling is not an exception. In the last few years, we have seen tons of websites reviewing all sort of places for tourists to visit, like hotels and restaurants, buying ads on the internet so their recommendations receive more visits, and at some point, the goal seem to have shifted, instead of offering objective and honest information to the readers, some websites and reviewers simply began to exaggerate the good parts and to ignore the bad parts of the places they were writing about. It became a dynamic in which honesty was penalized and dishonesty was rewarded, everything was upside down and the people more affected by this were of course, the travelers and tourists that ended up believing and trusting information that wasn’t always accurate.

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The most extreme example of this dynamic is when a fake restaurant in London managed to reach #1 position on TripAdvisor (a website where people share reviews about all sort of places), the person who did it said "restaurant owners would pay me £10 and I'd write a positive review of their place, despite never eating there" ^Source, and after having sort of an epiphany, he decided to try his luck with a fake restaurant of his own, with incredible results that were the ultimate proof that something is broken and that the dynamic clearly needs to change.

It doesn’t just happen in the online world, when I went to visit Italy a few years ago with my family, we were walking through the streets of Rome and when it was about time to have lunch, we went to a very visible restaurant with good looks hoping to eat some delicious Italian pasta. Well, it turns out our experience in there was far from great, not only the food wasn’t as tasty as we expected, but the waiter messed up our order and got confused, delivering something we didn’t ask for. This is the type of things only local people can be aware of.

Now, imagine a world in which people can have the opportunity to honestly and transparently share the information they know about the city they live, help another individual along the way, and finally be rewarded for this. Everyone of us have knowledge about our city that could be of great help to a person visiting from abroad, and so far, there have not been a proper platform that could allow for such an interaction to be possible.

How can Cool Cousin fix the current issues in the industry?

Cool Cousin is a new decentralized platform that allows travelers all around the world to search and connect with local people (called Cousins) that live in the cities they are going to visit, in order to learn from them about the ins and outs of the city and the places that are really worthy of visit, they are like an online travel agent, whose main goal is to offer you good information and leverage blockchain mechanisms to receive rewards.

Every traveler can chose their own cousins based on shared likes and receive personalized information, which is something important because not everyone has the same tastes and enjoy the same things, using Cool Cousin there is the possibility of engaging just with like minded people and have a more fluid conversation and engagement because of this.

This is particularly important for giving coverage to smaller places or little events that don’t receive much publicity yet are really fun to visit, a Cousin (the local) can easily be always informed about these events or places especially if this person maintains a very active social life, and conveniently share that information with the traveler through the Cool Cousin platform.

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Unlike a lot of review websites, Cousins cannot be bought off because the community itself being a decentralized one, self regulate. This is possible because every recommendation coming from a Cousin can be checked by travelers to see if there is any inaccuracy or mistakes. They can even share pictures about the places they visit to back up their opinion, and of course, since they would also be sharing useful and valuable information, they can become a Contributor and receive proper rewards as well.

Thanks to this new approach, with Cool Cousin honesty is rewarded and dishonesty is punished, just like it always should be in any place, but sadly its not always the case as we saw in the example mentioned early.

A paradigm shift in the traveling industry

Similar to the impact that AirBnb and Uber have had on their respective industries by allowing common people to be rewarded by doing regular things like driving around or easily renting their home space, Cool Cousin is capable of doing the same when it comes to information about places and events. It would make it so much easier for people to access this valuable information as a consumer, or to offer it as a local.

The entire travel industry could see an explosion of people wanting, and most importantly, being able to take part in this new dynamic and offer their knowledge, and who knows, maybe even hopefully create new friendships between Cousins and travelers, they would have the same likes after all.

The difference in the traveling experience could be huge, because it is not the same to go out there on our own to an unknown city searching for something interesting to do or some fine place to visit, than having the equivalent of an online personal guide that takes care of everything related with identifying good places from the not so good ones. It would take a mental load off of the traveler’s head, while also help them relax and enjoy their trip much more by saving them bad experiences while also gaining knowledge that only local people would know. Everyone wins.

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This could open up a new way or earning a living and could be like a dream come true for highly sociable people that have no problem engaging with strangers and are always on top of every social event there is.

The rewards are in the form of the CUZ token, and Cousins will receive them based on the quality and accuracy of the information they share in the platform, while travelers can receive them if they become a Contributor as mentioned before. Since everyone can be rewarded by actively participating and engaging with the community, this could potentially make vacations much more fun, as people would always be on the lookout to take spectacular pictures in order to nourish the Cool Cousin platform with them, in fact, I can easily imagine a new way of online competition, in which travelers compete with each other by creating and contributing the best content possible, and then having the community reward the ones who did the best job. The same could happen with the Cousins, there could be monthly competitions in which the best Cousins out there get recognition and the correspondent reward in the form of the CUZ token of course.

By doing this hypothetical competitions, the engagement would be even bigger and it will add much more fun for everyone, while also adding value to the community and therefore, to the project itself.

Summary

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Traveling is a incredibly huge industry, where people are starting to become dishonest when giving reviews about different sites, not caring about the possible consequences in users trusting those reviews. Thankfully, thanks to blockchain technology a new platform called Cool Cousin is offering solutions to this broken dynamic, in which through a decentralized community, people can be rewarded by sharing valuable information about the best places to visit in the city. It solves the honesty issue present in so many websites because in this case, the community can regulate itself, so dishonesty would sooner or later be discovered and punished proportionally. Thanks to this new platform, now users aren’t rewarded for being dishonest but for being honest, besides, the possibility of receiving the CUZ token is also a strong incentive for every type of user to start being active while also having a good time, because let’s face it, who wouldn’t want to engage with people who love to travel and knows about cool places to visit? Being rewarded for having fun is one of the ultimate perks Cool Cousin offers to its lucky users.

And of course, businesses will also be able to promote their own places inside Cool Cousin, although this content will be separated from the Cousin's recommendations so users can clearly know the difference between a 100% objective recommendation, and a sponsored one.

I just downloaded the Cool Cousin app because I am considering the possibilities of becoming a Cousin myself, here is a video I just made showing the app and how a traveler can easily find a Cousin in the correspondent city. Hope you guys enjoy it:

If you want to know more about this company, I invite you to visit their website.
If you want to know more about how this blockchain project works, please feel free to check their whitepaper.
For some explanatory videos, please visit their youtube channel.
If you want to read official and informative articles about this project, you can find those here.
And if you want to ask me any question about this project, feel free to leave a comment below.

This is my entry for the @originalworks contest that can be found here

cc2018

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