What travelling means to you?

Travelling. This word means so much for us. Travelling is one of the greatest gifts of civilization. There was a time when visiting another city was a hard task, now you can get yourself to the opposite site of the globe in less than a day. Travelling is a great fun, an experience that you will hold in your memory forever. It means trying to speak in a language you don’t know in cafe and being thankful that the waiter tries to understand you. Travelling is when you realize you don’t need all that stuff you store at home and that you can happily live with things you carry in a suitcase. Traveling means making friends with people you wouldn’t met otherwise. Travelling is an exploration. The time when you dive into another culture and willingly accept a different point of view. I can speak about it forever, but words will never that feeling you have when your plane lands in a new location.

I’ve always used to think that travelling shows you the true life of another country. The experience you get define the true spirit of the place.

The realization hit me hard when my home city became a host to FIFA World Cup 2018. I live in Nizhny Novgorod, a beautiful city standing on the banks of two great rivers Volga and Oka.

My city is not very popular among foreign tourists, but this summer thousands of football fans from England, Sweden, Switzerland, Argentina, Croatia and etc. will come on a visit. They will not see my city. They will see something else, something that travel agencies will show them. The true spirit of my home city will remain a mystery for them. They will buy an expensive bus trip and will see only busy traffic of business center and maybe some places they will find interesting. At the same time everyone born here knows that you can walk through the historic part of the city and see so much more. Passing through narrow streets, enjoying the history of this place, taking pictures of magnificent views of the city.

Source

Tourist’s guides will route them to boring museums and churches, while the best travelling experience is in the old streets and riverbanks.

Source

They will dine in overly expensive restaurants that published a better advertisement on the internet instead of tasting local food in small cafes, and they will never taste our all famous “shaurma na srednom”, a remarkable peace of street food culture of the city.

They will be here and at the same time somewhere else. This makes me question my own travelling experience. How much did I actually saw? How can we enrich our travelling experience? The only answer is to have a local cousin/friend, someone you can trust to be your guide. You will say this is not possible, you can’t have a cousin in every travel destination. I will say wake up. It’s 2018 my friend, the blockchain has already found a solution – Cool Cousin project.

Cool Cousin project

Cool Cousin aims to build the world first decentralized ecosystem that uses blockchain technology and smart contracts to guarantee the direct and secure exchange of knowledge and services between travelers and locals. First time in your life you will get guidance on your travel destination not because someone wants to sell it for you, but because someone cares about your travel experience. All this huge travel companies that control centralized travel industry and leave you with predetermined options instead of real variety a country can offer will not disappear, but they will not determine the course of your travel anymore. All the small companies that didn’t stand a chance against travel whales will be able to offer their excellent services to you and your friends at a better terms. Sounds too good to be true and yet the future of travel is almost here.

The future always belongs to the young. Travelling is fun at any age, but will all know the young travel more often. We have to check dozens of websites before the trip to get the information we need. Yet we still can’t trust as almost all travel recommendations on the internet are misleading and put there to promote someone’s services. In July 2016 Cool Cousin launched their app to fix this. Cool Cousin is the closest thing to having a friend in your travel destination.

1000+ “Cousins” from 65 cities are already waiting for you. Take a minute to think how cool is it to get a travel advice from someone your age and with common interests instead of sales promotion form a travel agency.

How Cool Cousin community works?

There are several roles that you can play in the community.

• Cousins Locals that post on their profile various information for travelers. They can earn CUZ tokens for keeping their guides up-to-date and content creation.
• Pro-Cousins Cousins who wish to expand their services and function like travel agents.
• Users Travelers who get free information and can buy extra service with tokens. They can also earn tokens.
• Contributors Users that earn CUZ tokens for adding value to the platform.
• Editors Users that earned status of Editor can validate Contributors’ content.
• Board of representatives Representatives of company and community that decide matters of community standards and work on conflict resolution.
• Business owners Vendors whose business have been recommended by a Cousin.

As you see the community is completely decentralized and follows self-governing model. Company just provides the infrastructure and collects small fees for their service. This is exactly what we want to see as cryptocurrency enthusiasts.

Cool Cousin as ICO project

We shouldn’t forget that Cool Cousin is at ICO stage now. Let’s look at it from ICO perspective.

Does it needs blockchain? The answers is clear. Blockchain guarantees transparency and trustful relationships in the community. For company itself it brings competitive advantage of low fees that can be achieved on a centralized platform.

Preserving mutual interests As we’ve already seen travelers greatly benefit for the platform. Especially millennials, who are the target group for the project. Local “cousins” can make friends and earn on the platform. Local vendors that offer quality services gain competitive advantages in promotion. Large travel companies that spoiled your previous trip are in disadvantage though.

Token Economics Any project needs to have a good token economics. Economic model of this project reminds me of steemit. Cousins are rewarded for creating quality content and for keeping it up to date. Users can earn tokens for curating it in some way. Users can spent tokens to pay for additional services. The constant demand for CUZ token will be guaranteed by the rapid growth of travel industry and by the explosive growth of Cool Cousin platform itself. Travel industry account for 10% of the world’s GDP. For some countries the percentage is even bigger. The industry grew from $1.9 trillion up to $2.3 trillion in past ten years. Cool Cousin user base grew from 150k up to 550k from July, 2016. As you know any company gets a boost by adding “blockchain” to its name. Imagine how it will be boosted when the blockchain technology is actually perfectly used.

Do your own research of this great project, but before you dig into it, do a metal experiment like a true scientist. Spend some time to remember your previous travel experience. Try to imagine what it would look like, if a local friend could guide your and answer your questions before you arrived.

As always, here are some useful links for you:

Cool Cousin Website
Cool Cousin WhitePaper
Cool Cousin Telegram
Cool Cousin Reddit
Cool Cousin BitcoinTalk
Cool Cousin Twitter
Cool Cousin Facebook
Cool Cousin Linkedin
Cool Cousin Medium
Cool Cousin Instagram

Disclaimer

I’m not a financial of any kind. I encourage you to check all information yourself and make decision only based on your own opinion. All articles are created for solely entertainment purpose.

If you like this post please vote for it and follow me on Steemit. Feel free share your thoughts in comment section.

You can also follow me on twitter. I will be posting interesting news and articles there.

The post is submitted for @OriginalWorks contest here.

cc2018