What Is LockTrip?

LockTrip is one of the first platforms in the world to look at a potential efficiency gains for the online travel booking industry in the area of blockchain technology.

The basic idea is that LockTrip can act as a more decentralized alternative to platforms like Expedia or Hotels.com and cut costs by removing commissions that are earned by a middleman between the hotel or home rental providers and their potential customers. With LockTrip, consumers and providers of hotels, flights, and other travel expenses are able to find each other directly and avoid the high commissions that cut into consumers budgets and accommodation providers’ profits, which means the new system is intended to benefit both sides of the transaction.

Unlike many other projects in the crypto and blockchain technology space that have their own token, LockTrip is already a live project and people can already try it out today.

Is LockTrip Safe?

In their marketing materials, LockTrip proudly proclaim that two of the project’s founding team members were involved in an extremely early bitcoin exchange known as Bitcoin7. This exchange was founded in 2011, which goes to show that these guys were extremely early to the Bitcoin market, and they were early adopters of this technology that has continued to blossom over the past decade. The only problem with LockTrip’s connection to Bitcoin7 is that the bitcoin exchange was hacked for more than 5,000 BTC not long after it was originally launched. According to the messaging coming out of the Bitcoin7 team at the time, it is suspected that an insider at the exchange was the one who ran off with customer funds. Although the stolen user funds were not worth much at the time of the theft, those 5,000 BTC are now worth roughly $250 million.

Of course, 2011 was an extremely early time for bitcoin exchanges, and literally all of the other crypto exchanges that existed at that time are also gone, with Mt. Gox being the most notable platform that offered bitcoin trading back then. In other words, what happened with Bitcoin7 was par for the course when it comes to bitcoin exchanges that existed in 2011. Additionally, LockTrip is not an exchange, and users do not need to store their crypto holdings on the platform in order to use it. Instead, the crypto-aspect of the LockTrip platform is mostly just needed for payments and incentivizing people to use the platform without charging commissions.

How Much is LockTrip?

For LockTrip, the key feature used to attract new users is the lack of added costs when the platform connects a traveler with a property owner or airline. While you need to create an account in order to see the prices offered by the LockTrip platform, they are indeed cheaper than what you’ll find on other online travel aggregators.

The platform claims travelers can find prices up to 60% lower than where they are on other, similar travel sites. More realistically, the savings on hotel bookings usually top out at around 20% to 30%, and there aren’t many options offering this level of savings in each city. In most cases, the savings offered by LockTrip compared to other aggregators is going to be around 10%, which is still a nice perk that cannot be overlooked. LockTrip is obviously also perfect for owners of hotels and other properties, as they’re able to keep 100% of their profits rather than paying a commission to LockTrip.

What are the Best Features of LockTrip?

The key selling point for LockTrip is obviously their policy around 0% commissions. This benefits both the bank account of the consumers and the profit margin of the property owners that use LockTrip. Without the large savings that are possible with LockTrip, there would be no reason to move over to the platform from traditional online travel agencies like Expedia or Booking.com.

Of course, another perk of LockTrip is that users are able to pay for their travel expenses via digital currencies. Currently, five different cryptocurrencies can be used to pay for travel accommodations via LockTrip: Electroneum, Bitcoin, Ethereum, USD Coin, and Litecoin.

A final potential perk of the overall LockTrip system is that anyone can bet on the future success of the LockTrip platform by purchasing LOC tokens. Of course, the tokenomics behind utility tokens like LOC are still rather experimental, so anyone who purchases LOC tokens should consider this a rather risky speculation at this time.

Potential Dealbreakers

The biggest potential dealbreaker that is often brought up with LockTrip is the connection the platform has with early bitcoin exchange Bitcoin7. While LockTrip’s marketing materials talk about the connection some of their founders have with Bitcoin7 as a positive story about these individuals getting involved with bitcoin in the very early days of the technology, the reality is the platform lost 5,000 BTC of user funds through a hack of the exchange. Some potential LockTrip users will simply not feel comfortable using the platform due to its connection with Bitcoin7, even though the security incident happened all the way back in 2011 at a time when there wasn’t really such thing as a trusted, reputable bitcoin exchange.

Another downside of LockTrip that is often brought up by potential users of the platform is that the prices offered by the travel accommodations aggregator cannot be viewed unless you create an account. This is obviously an attempt to generate more user accounts on LockTrip, but some people are turned off when they’re unable to compare the prices on LockTrip with the prices on similar platforms without first creating an account.