Understanding Blockchain Technology and Its Potential Applications in the Tourism Industry

The author, a senior engineer at YMFE responsible for hybrid and React Native mobile solutions, shares personal reflections after reading the book Artificial Intelligence Era: Understanding Blockchain Finance in One Book and discusses blockchain technology and its relevance to the tourism industry.

What Is Blockchain Technology

Blockchain is a distributed database built on data blocks, providing decentralization, security through RSA asymmetric encryption, trust via smart contracts, anonymity via digital keys, and immutable transaction records (subject to the 51% attack problem). The core components are illustrated with code snippets such as 基于数据区块的数据库 , RSA非对称加密 , and 理论上不会有任何违约行为 .

What Problems Can Blockchain Solve

Key characteristics—decentralization, smart contracts, and security—address trust issues in finance by giving every participant a shared, tamper‑proof ledger, reducing reliance on central institutions, and lowering audit and regulatory costs.

Decentralization – Trust Issues

By allowing all users to hold a complete ledger, blockchain shifts trust from financial institutions to the product itself, enabling transparent verification of transactions and reducing operational overhead for institutions.

Smart Contracts – Breach Issues

Smart contracts encode agreement rules in executable code, eliminating ambiguous textual interpretations, ensuring automatic enforcement, and providing immutable evidence of any breach.

Security – Privacy Leakage

While blockchain offers strong anonymity, it also protects transaction privacy; only transaction time and amount are visible, not the identities of the parties.

Summary of Features

Decentralization, smart contracts, and security work together: without decentralization, contracts can be altered; without smart contracts, decentralization lacks enforceability; without security, the entire system is vulnerable.

Blockchain in the Tourism Industry

Although many travel companies claim blockchain projects, few have delivered concrete results. Examples include Webjet tracking hotel inventory on a private Ethereum network, TUI Group considering a private Ethereum migration, S7 partnering with Alfa‑Bank for settlement, and Innfinity using Ethereum for NDC content aggregation.

Potential use cases discussed:

Ticket Over‑booking : By recording ticket sales on a blockchain, double‑booking can be prevented, as records are immutable and transparent to all parties.

Ride‑hailing Platform Fees : A blockchain‑based P2P model could lower platform costs, provide transparent pricing, and reduce the need for intermediaries.

Hotel Reservation Management : A blockchain‑enabled supply chain could improve efficiency, security, and cost, delivering more accurate, real‑time, and cheaper bookings.

These scenarios rely on sufficient computational power (hashrate) from multiple nodes to maintain decentralization; otherwise, the system reverts to a centralized model.

Current Drawbacks of Blockchain

Security concerns include algorithmic vulnerabilities (e.g., RSA weaknesses), the risk of 51% attacks, private‑key theft, and anonymity facilitating illicit activities. Regulatory challenges arise because smart contracts may contain loopholes that malicious actors can exploit, necessitating technical governance.

Usability issues involve the steep learning curve for non‑technical users, the massive size of blockchain data (e.g., Bitcoin's ~150 GB blockchain), and the need for reliable network connectivity.

Performance limitations are highlighted by the low transaction throughput of proof‑of‑work blockchains (≈650 k transactions per day for Bitcoin) compared to systems like Alipay (≈25.6 M transactions per second).

Conclusion

The author believes blockchain is a promising technology beyond digital currencies, capable of solving many information‑centric problems across industries. While drawbacks exist, they can often be mitigated through technical upgrades, and embracing blockchain can drive innovation and better outcomes.