How Blockchain Technology Impacts Hotel Room Reservations, with Arul Prakash.

Episode Transcript

Arul Prakash: Hotels deploy millions of dollars to set up price parity monitoring tools In terms of pricing. Am I selling below what I’m supposed to sell and so on. What if there is a mechanism to control it rather than monitor it? So when I say control, it means that you’re programmatically controlling something, stopping something from happening compared to running price parity monitoring tools which are checking from different sides what the data is. Then you do postmortem. Then you go back to the legal team, raise an email, raise a notice, and so on. What if someone could just not bypass it, which is what a tokenized inventory can actually enable? It can improve a revenue management professionals life in terms of understanding which channel they want to control, in terms of where it is selling and also at what price it is selling. So if it is last minute deals, trying to access a certain resort property, they just will not be able to buy it at all. 

Robin Trimingham: Welcome to the Innovative Hotelier podcast by Hotels magazine with weekly thought provoking discussions with the world’s leading hotel and hospitality innovators. Welcome to the innovative hotelier brought to you by Hotels magazine. I’m your host, Robin Trimingham. So as we’ve discussed time and again on previous episodes, the hotel industry as a whole has resisted embracing advances in technology, whether it be tokenized AI or even basics like cloud based CRMs and instead continues to cling to on premises legacy systems for pricing models and inventory control. My guest today, Arul Prakash, founder and CEO of Buk Technology, believes that this outdated thinking needs to change now, and it’s time to rethink all your assumptions about inventory and pricing models. In his words, technology has been seen as an enabler by the hotel industry. That is wrong. It’s a value creator. And he’s here today to explain how blockchain is already revolutionizing pricing and distribution control among forward thinking hoteliers in India and Europe and North America, and what he believes will happen to hoteliers who do not seize the day. Join me now for a fascinating conversation with a Arul Prakash. For the last 50 years, Groupe GM has been a leader in the luxury cosmetic amenities industry. The group proposes a 360 solution from manufacturing to distribution, with over 40 international brands in its worldwide distribution network. Groupe GM offers different shapes and sizes of eco friendly products in hotels all over the world. Discover more on www.GroupeGM.com That’s group with an “E” GM.com. Welcome, Arul. Thank you so much for joining me today. 

Arul Prakash: Thank you. Thanks, Robin. Thanks for having me here. I’m excited to be here. 

Robin Trimingham: Well, when I came across your profile on LinkedIn, I was immediately intrigued. Can you give us a very brief overview? What got you interested in blockchain applications for the hotel industry? 

Arul Prakash: Chuck, I think it’s a good start to what we’re going to be discussing today. So I’ve been working on consumer facing industries for the last 18 years or so, working with multiple Fortune 50 companies across the spectrum of consumer goods, retail, aviation, travel and hospitality and so on. Right? So please treat my perspectives more with an outsider view of what outside world looks at hospitality industry for and and I’m really happy that I’m able to provide that kind of a holistic view for the discussion today. So that’s kind of a context a little bit, right? So when I started my career, I remember about 15, 18 years back, that was the time when Internet kind of kicked off, right? And obviously at that point in time, hospitality industry was at the cutting edge of what they were trying to do with all the OTAs coming in, access to inventory, completely distributed. Anyone can access any inventory anywhere and so on, right? And all the industries that I used to work with at that point in time used to always look up to hospitality industry as the North Star. See, these guys have cracked access to market, they’ve cracked how you reach out to customers and that’s how you need to use technology. And unfortunately so today all those industries are much beyond where we are. And it’s been two decades since I would say that there’s been any ground breaking innovation that has actually struck how we access information, how we access distribution in the hospitality industry space. Right? So only now are we discussing about how many hotels are going to go to cloud computing, which happened ten years back in other industries, Right. It’s crazy. So the world is definitely and you know, the rest of the industries are talking about decentralized and distributed computing. While we are thinking about now, we need to move to cloud computing, right? So I would say it’s sad, but it’s an opportunity here, right? It’s an opportunity in terms of an industry which probably got a bit left behind to really leapfrog front, to overcome a certain stage that otherwise would not have been possible. Now hospitality industry can and blockchain is one such technology which can really change the way hospitality industry operates, right? It’s not about the facade which is there in front of the guest. That’s not the only thing, right? You make your hotel fancier, you make it look more for young. But if your back end doesn’t support what their ardent desires are, that’s not something that’s great. So that’s where I see that there is a really good overlap of what blockchain technology can do in terms of access to information, in terms of distribution of information and access to customers in the hospitality industry, right? So that’s where there was a lot of big opportunity to capture and happy to be here for that. 

Robin Trimingham: I’m so glad that we’re talking, as my regular listeners will know, I’m a little bit older than I look, so I remember the very start of the Internet and it being used for business and everybody saying, Oh, you know, it’s just a toy or Oh, it’s just a storefront. There will never be business applications. So I’ve lived through one of these really difficult changes already, but you’re about to terrify some of my traditional listeners because I’m going to ask you about the tokenization of room bookings. We’ve got to explain this to everybody. How is this different from how hotels manage room bookings currently? And in your opinion, why is this a better system from the travelers perspective? And then we’re going to get on later to talk about why a business should care about that. 

Arul Prakash: Sure. The entire concept of tokenization is built on top of blockchain, so forget about what blockchain is. Don’t worry about what tokenization is. Let me kind of relate to it with in terms of an example, right? Imagine you are getting a booking confirmation via an email today. What if I could give that booking confirmation to someone else and still the IOU that the hotel has with that initial guest transfers to the next person as well? Right now, that digital copy, that piece of paper, that email is verifiable piece of document which removes which cannot be duplicated. So there is only one type of it. It cannot be duplicated at all. So a digital copy of something that exists which cannot be duplicated, you cannot do a control C control V on it. It doesn’t work that way, but it is verifiable at any point in time, which means that if I get a particular room on an OTA site, if it is in form of a tokenized room booking, I can verify that this room has come from this particular hotel on blockchain, right? So that’s what blockchain enables you. It avoids duplication, it removes possibility of any possible frauds. Let’s look at some other examples as well where tokenization is happening, because it’s not just the hotel industry, right? So tokenization today is happening in form of land records. Think of it, or real estate properties, right? So imagine that there are 100 people who are forming a group and saying that I’m going to buy. Just one single apartment. So each of them are getting 100 portion of that particular property. And every time rent is deposited against that particular property, that rent gets distributed and goes to 100 different people. Right. So that 100 representation of ownership is also tokenized format. So similarly you could have your loyalty membership cards, which are your gold, silver, platinum, etcetera, also in a tokenized format where when that person accesses the system with his tokenized identity, because it is digital in nature, you change the experience of that application completely, right? You make it more luxurious or you make it more value focused completely based on who is logging in, based on identifier. So that duplicatable form of digital data is what we call as tokenized. Now when you are able to tokenize a specific IOU of a room booking, which means that for a specific room type, for a specific property, for a specific night, create a token which says that whoever is holding this particular digital token is the rightful custodian or the rightful guest of that particular room. Right? That’s how tokenization of hotel room booking works. Now, what I explained to you is both from a B2C perspective, from a guest perspective, now imagine you’re able to create this tokens which moves across your entire distribution chain through Bedbank, through OTAs and so on. Right? So I’ll address the B2B benefits of how the tokenization plays out. Now who are we building this tokenized hotel room booking for? We’re not doing it for the entire world. We do not believe that the entire world is going to come on to this kind of a mechanism. We are building this for a younger audience, right? Which is probably between 20 to 35 or 20 to 40 kind of an audience, which is obviously much ahead in terms of digital adoption. They understand these things much better. And if you see this is the Age segment which spends towards travel most in terms of wallet share percentage compared to any previous generation that ever existed. Right. So it wouldn’t be good from a hoteliers perspective to not look at this segment from a future perspective. Right? That’s the segment that we’re looking at. And if you see what they prefer, how the mindset is right, they want they do not like conformity. They do not like being put in a box. Right. They don’t like limitations. Flexible. Yeah, exactly. They want flexibility right now. How are playing today to appeal to this audience? They’re giving them paid property. They’re giving them free cancellations. Obviously, all of them come at a certain cost to the hotel as well. Now, how can hotels provide that flexibility to the certain audience? It’s not by keeping your pool table near the reception desk or the lobby. That’s just the front of it. But what this user wants is flexibility in terms of planning their travel. Today, when you plan your travel 50% of the time goes into planning, 50% is towards experiencing it. How can we reduce the planning time by making it more flexible, making it more about exploration and experience right. And that’s what this particular age segment wants. And changing how distribution works is critical for ensuring that these kind of experiences can be built at the consumer front. I hope that kind of explains some of this. 

Robin Trimingham: Yeah, it does. But it’s a mountain of information for all of us who are new to all of these ideas that you’re living and breathing. So let’s try and break this down into smaller chunks. The number one thing for our listeners to grab hold of here is that this younger audience is, in our lifetime, going to be the biggest, most lucrative market segment. And that’s why everybody needs to listen up and pay attention to what we’re talking about now, because there’s this window of opportunity to be one of the front runners in embracing this, which means you’re cornering the market down the road. Okay. Exactly. Talked about the OTAs. Let’s talk about this, because OTAs in the minds of the hoteliers are a double edged sword and a necessary evil. Some of us might be tempted to say, and they’re not without controversy because of course they do bring lots of business, but it’s slimmer margins and you can have a problem in that you’re finding your property advertised on platforms that you never authorized in ways that you might not prefer. How does tokenization improve this situation? 

Arul Prakash: Sure. So we need to understand some core tenants of what a blockchain based system provides with tokenization, right? Apart from few other aspects to specific aspects that are relevant for us is one transparency and second is control. Now, with a tokenized booking, a hotel gets 100% visibility to its full flow of custody, much beyond its primary sale, which is what hotels have today. Right. You only know the price at which you sold to your first person that you sold to. You don’t know what happens after that. Where does it go? Who does it reach? What price is it getting sold at right now? When you have that visibility, it actually reduces the distance between the hotel and the guest in terms of the number of intermediaries involved as well. So assume there is a luxury property, a luxury resort property. Who doesn’t want their property to be listed on last minute deals.com or deals for you.com. Right. Obviously that’s not your segment. Now there is no way today that you can actually stop it because there is a bed bank who bought it, who sold it to an OTA who sold it to a tour operator who’s selling experience. There’s no way to control it. Now, a tokenized inventory is a controllable mechanism, which means that even if you do sell to a bed bank, your inventory, the tokenized room generated by you are always under your visibility and your control, which you can define that this bed bank is an authorized person to transact and this one is not thereby giving you much more control in terms of where it is being sold. And in addition, it can also be that hotels deploy millions of dollars to set up price parity monitoring tools. Right. In terms of pricing. Am I selling below what I’m supposed to sell and so on. What if there is a mechanism to control it rather than monitor it, which means. Okay, so. 

Robin Trimingham: Explain the difference there for us. 

Arul Prakash: So when I say control, it means that you’re programmatically controlling something, stopping something from happening compared to running price parity monitoring tools which are checking from different sides what the data is. Then you do postmortem, then you go back to the legal team, raise an email, raise a notice, and so on. What if someone could just not bypass it programmatically? Impossible. Right? Which is what a tokenized inventory can actually enable. It can improve a revenue management professionals life in terms of understanding which channel they want to control, in terms of where it is selling and also at what price it is selling. So if it is last minute deals.com, trying to access a certain resort property, they just will not be able to buy it at all. That’s a mechanism that can be done in terms of a blockchain based solution because every transaction that happens has to go through an approval that happens from the hotels contracts, right? So these approvals are not manual. No one needs to sit and do it. These are programmatically already defined. So you can say that there are this ten channels through which the inventory has to go. If there is another 11 channel who tries to access this inventory stop, that’s it. And the same thing can be applied in terms of prices. If I want to sell a certain room at $500, if someone tries to sell it at $400, it stops you from selling at $400 rather than later monitoring who sold it at $400. Right. And this itself also creates new opportunities in terms of tradability of hotel rooms where people can sell from one level to the other, increasing revenue by at least about 3% in terms of rent. 

Robin Trimingham: Now, I’ve got a follow up question for you, and I don’t know whether this is applicable to your technology or not. I’ve been talking to lots of others in the AI space and they’re always talking to me about machine learning. Earning and how over time the technology can in turn start making recommendations to you to improve business. Is there a world in which over time your technology could then be saying to the hotelier, Well, based on the parameters you’ve set, did you know you should also be offering your rooms here or in this way and that would be really profitable? 

Arul Prakash: Exactly. So this is kind of the same concept that dynamic pricing largely works around taking a lot of inputs into how the pricing engine actually needs to work, right? So it’s about taking as many feeds in terms of competitor price information, seasonality, local events, all of these feeding into a certain engine which defines what is the right price for this room right now. It’s awesome that hotel industry or multiple other industries have dynamic pricing in terms of how it operates, but we all know how it works. It’s Geico, right? So Geico stands for garbage in, garbage out. So if you don’t give in the right parameters, you will not get the right results. And we know that these optimization techniques require a lot of data for something of this sort to work. Right now, let’s rewind on why we would do something of this sort counterintuitively. This is not about margin and this is not about revenue. This is about finding the right price at the right time for the right channel. Once you take care of that, everything else takes care of itself. So as you keep improving the price, the margin and revenue automatically takes care of itself. So now with tokenization, it’s not a replacement for dynamic pricing. It’s about adding a new field of information which improves your price making decision making. How does that happen? Right. We did not talk about one aspect, which is about the tradability angle of what tokenized room brings, and that’s the value that price discovery helps in. Now, when you tokenize a room, it creates a liquid market where anyone can buy and sell these rooms, just as it happens today when on WhatsApp groups and telegram groups, you know that travel agents and tour operators are chatting between themselves and selling room inventory over this, We’re trying to make that transparent. We’re making it on chain on blockchain so that every transfer that happens, you know, what is the price that it was sold at? And you also know, how much did a guest pay for it? When you have a liquid market where the guest is paying for certain things, you know what price it sold at? That’s free market principles. That’s completely free market, which means that’s the best form of price input that you can feed into your dynamic pricing tools for identifying what’s the right price that a customer is willing to pay, Right? So how does a hotel go about doing this? I’m not saying put 100% of your inventory into the tokenized model. No, just take 10%, ten of your rooms out of 100 rooms into the tokenized inventory model. Let the free market principles run there. Let it trade. Let people decide what price they want to give. You win over time. Understand your algorithm over time will understand what the right price is. You feed that to improve the margins on 90% of your channel revenue. That’s how tokenization tradability will actually improve pricing decisions. 

Robin Trimingham: Did you know that offering top cosmetic brands is a delight for your guests? For the last 50 years, Groupe GM has been a leader in the luxury amenity industry. The group proposes a 360 solution for manufacturing to distribution on cosmetic amenities and dry accessories, with over 40 international brands such as Guerlain, Nukes, Atelier Cologne. The group offers different shapes and sizes of eco friendly products in hotels all over the world. This is possible thanks to its worldwide distribution network. Thanks to their Care about the Earth Program, you can offer your guests top cosmetic products with a reduced environmental impact. Discover more on Www.GroupeGM.com. That’s Group with an E GM.com. So I agree 100% with what you’re advocating here. But a lot of my audience right now are going to be folding their arms and just going, heck, no. Why, in your opinion, is that a naive attitude? 

Arul Prakash: I wouldn’t call it a naive attitude. I think it’s just human nature, right? We don’t want change. As simple as it be comfortable with 20 years of whatever we’ve been doing and we don’t want to change it. It reminds me back to 15 years back where there was this major wave of all the banks digitizing, right? Computerization is what the word was back then, that all the banks are getting computerized and all the bank employees and unions were having a strike that you cannot computerize our jobs. We’ll lose our jobs. Right now, you can’t imagine a bank which doesn’t give you a website, a portal where you can access your accounts, right? It’s you just can’t differentiate it. Every bank is a digital bank. There is no digital bank. Every bank has to be digital. So it’s the same way, right? We just at the cusp of that technology change where it’s not a choice between do I tokenize my inventory or not. It’s a matter of when. The earlier one who adopts certain percentage of their inventory into the tokenized model gets to benefit with the rest of the channels that they’re operating because of the better improved price discovery that exists? 

Robin Trimingham: Okay. So I think a few of our listeners are going to be quite shocked to hear that you already work with Expedia Group. Tell us a little bit about your partnership with them. Can you? 

Arul Prakash: Got it. So it might be a good Segway to talk about what we’re doing at book and what we’re trying to do right? So we are basically an ecosystem or a suite of products which focuses on tokenization of hotel room bookings, which creates a marketplace where people can trade hotel room bookings, just like people trade agro commodities, right? Imagine what agro commodities it has huge demand everywhere around the world. It has a certain shelf life within which you have to use it. And it also kind of provides a level playing field where everyone knows what the price for a certain product across the globe is. So it kind of increase the transparency around it. So as a traveler, it gives me a lot of flexibility when I’m able to resell some of this booking instead of canceling it as a hotelier instead of canceling when a customer is reselling it, it obviously improves the occupancy ratio. So today, if a hotel says that 5% of my rooms are nonrefundable rooms, that I’m not going to return any money, whatever money I got, I keep it with myself in middle of the customer walks in or not just transition that thought to a reasonable model where anyone who buys that room can actually resell that room to someone else. The hotel’s revenue is assured, but you also add the layer of flexibility for the user. 

Robin Trimingham: So you you’re removing the risk. 

Arul Prakash: Exactly. So as a hotelier, my risk is gone. So you can increase your 5% allocation to non-refundable bookings to probably 10 or 15% because now people are going to be starting buying and trading them. And with Expedia, what we are doing right now because you know, there is a B2B angle and a B2C angle to our place wherein we need to attract the 25 to 35 audience, also to our platform. So with Expedia, we just kickstarting that journey wherein as a user, when you come to our platform to a marketplace which is called Book Trip.com Trip.com users will be able to buy a room, pay using cryptocurrency where you’re accessing Expedia as inventory. And second, for every booking that you have, we do tokenize that room booking and we give a representation in form of an NFT. That’s what we’re doing with Expedia. We do not do tradable inventory. We do not resell the inventory because that’s not what the intent with Expedia is. The next phase of expansion is where we go directly contract with hoteliers, just like all the hoteliers and revenue managers who are listening to this in terms of signing up new contracts and trying to get them on board via very simple integration through channel manager solutions so that their inventory also will be available on our platform and we’ll be able to resell it, right? So to cut shot with Expedia, it’s we are able to get a new audience even for them as a distribution channel partner, also to the hotels who are willing to pay through cryptocurrencies, right? So that’s a user segment which we’re opening up for Expedia through the partnership. But as we go deeper in partnerships with hotels directly, that’s when the tradable inventory kind of kicks in. 

Robin Trimingham: Okay, so let’s take the conversation one step further and help us understand how this can all help hoteliers more accurately project revenue and increase rev par, because that’s what our hoteliers care about most. Definitely. 

Arul Prakash: So as I’ve been saying, one of the pivotal features of this suite of products that we’re building on the value proposition itself is trading and reselling of hotel rooms. So. Assume that there is a hotel which is selling $100 at primary sale. Now that’s the end of revenue stream from a hotel perspective. So in case every time a hotel room changes hands that we pass, we basically it goes from a bedbank to an tour operator and so on. Whereas in our case, whenever a trade happens, whenever a transfer happens, assume $100 change to $120 to $140 across each level, we pass back 1% of the commission back to the hotel whose inventory is being traded. So if a $100 room inventory was sold, say, at the end at $150 over three transactions, that is easily an opportunity of 3 to 4% additional revenue that the hotel is earning in form of trading royalties. That’s how the rent increases. That’s from an additional revenue stream. Now, in terms of projecting revenue, like I said earlier, now the hotels can actually increase the total number of rooms that they allocate towards nonrefundable bookings. Why do hoteliers love nonrefundable bookings? Revenue assurance. Right. Accurate projections. They’re able to plan their operations better, and those things continue to exist by moving more of your non-refundable books bookings into resellable bookings. 

Robin Trimingham: Okay, So that’s an awful lot to absorb. Let’s say that people listening are there still with us. They’re still listening. What, in your opinion, is going to happen to brands that don’t embrace this type of new technology going forward? 

Arul Prakash: Yeah, I think this is where a perspective from what other industries do is very important for every other industry, right? So it’s very critical that when you are a consumer facing industry, there are certain shared learnings that you can take from other industries like hotel takes from aviation and aviation, takes from consumer goods and consumer goods, takes from retail businesses and so on. Right. Most of the changes that we see are slow and only seem to involve facade and front end of what the hotel is currently giving, Right. In terms of the user experience, guest experience, which is super critical. It is not just the end of that user behavior preferences. So if the hotel wants to tap into that younger age segment 2535 want to keep making sure that they have a steady flow of income coming from this particular age segment. They need to really sink into what is the underlying behavior. The ask that they have, which we discussed, is basically flexibility. And that flexibility doesn’t come with the facade and the front end. It comes with how your distribution infrastructure works. So that being relevant is the risk that a hotelier runs if they don’t sync up with what’s happening. That’s a simple summary of it. 

Robin Trimingham: Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right, because I can imagine a world in which, say, airlines and certain big brands partner together and say, you know what, We’re all going to learn how to do this together. And if you’re not on board, you do really stand the risk of being left at the wayside. Definitely. Okay. So a lot of what you’ve talked about is brand new. And you talked about the concept of changing 5 or 10% of your inventory to being tokenized rooms say a hotelier is interested and at least understanding better what this entails. Can you walk me through it? If you’ve got a hotel that’s currently got a legacy software platform, what is it going to take? And can you give us some idea of what sort of ballpark upfront costs would we be looking at here? 

Arul Prakash: So there are multiple tokenized platforms in the industry but will talk about what we are, right? So in our case the cost is zero. It takes two days to implement. That’s it. There is no technical upgrade, there are no operational changes required. Your service test, your reception desk, work, the work the same way your it works the same way. There are only two things that we ask of the hotel. One, that you have live inventory available via your channel manager or your systems, just like you’re providing your inventory today to an OTA via an API. Just give us the same API feed. That’s it. The second point is that please ensure that your system has the ability to change the guest name, which is like a modified reservation API. Usually it is called. Why? Because when we create tradable hotel rooms it means that made the booking under my name, but that booking needs to be transferred to another person’s name. So the guy who is going to be walking in is probably not the person who actually booked, right? So we need a mechanism via an API to update this modified reservation, which is available in almost 99% of the systems out there. That’s all that the ask is. Now what we’re building right now are the rails for enabling something of this around August is when all these integrations will be available. So with those, I can confidently say that at least about 70 to 80% of the hotel chains around the world, we will be able to integrate within two days. It’s just a matter of documentation. That’s it. Right? So anyone who is interested can definitely reach out to us at our website and we can provide the details. 

Robin Trimingham: I can see there’s massive potential for this in the sporting industry as well. I’m thinking season tickets for football, which Americans call soccer, or the American NFL football. Really here, the only barrier to entry is the mindset of the hotelier, isn’t it? 

Arul Prakash: Exactly. Exactly. That’s the only barrier you need to be okay to experiment. And that’s what the we learn from other industries as well. Right? So they they’re ahead because they experiment. They don’t experiment on everything. They take a small market, they take a small product line, they take a specific channel, try it out, then do the scale, do the same thing. Don’t be afraid to that this is something that might shatter things. Experiment a little test and control mechanism, right? So that’s what worked here. 

Robin Trimingham: I know I’ve found this a fascinating conversation. I think our listeners will, too. What’s your key message for everyone who watches this broadcast? 

Arul Prakash: Yeah, just stay open. And we’re happy to onboard any hotel present globally across we can onboard them to our system within the timelines that I mentioned come August. Right. That’s when it’s going to be happen. But until then, if you want to see what the user side of the experience looks, which is very similar to how typical OTA is, you can check out our website on book trip.com, trip.com. And that’s where a user can actually transact pay using cryptocurrency by getting NFT as well and get a tokenized hotel room booking. It’s very seamless, right? In fact, we are talking to certain hotels in Thailand who are looking at using our platform as a fundraising platform. It’s a $150 million project that they’re doing where they want to raise funds using our platform by pre-selling the hotel room bookings, right? So the property is not ready, but they’re selling their rooms much ahead of time so that they use this cash flow to build on put that capital back into the hotel. Right? So there is immense potential. It is not just distribution. It can come into reputation management, review management, fundraising. There are multiple things that this can solve. So we’re happy to work with anyone. If you are a hotelier, if you want to be a lighthouse customer, please do reach out. 

Robin Trimingham: So what you’re basically telling me then is a hotel that needs to fund capital improvements could exactly fund the capital improvements via your system. And what you’re actually selling is opportunity to stay in renovated guest rooms or something like that. 

Arul Prakash: Exactly. In fact, let me take it a notch further, considering we’re discussing this. This, I believe, was a patent that was filed way back in 2013 by Highgate. That’s the information that I have where they looked at a future where there are tradable hotel rooms. Now, what happens when you do tradable hotel rooms today? How does revenue management work that the inventory gets released in tranches? Right. They release 10%, six months ahead, 20%, four months ahead and so on. Right. What if the hotel could sell 50% of their inventory much ahead, six months ahead of time with the guarantee that when the occupancy ratio goes to 70%, 80%, 90%, they can rebuy their own inventory and resell it at a higher price. So you have ensured higher revenue while you have ensured cash flow as well, right? That’s our North Star. So we want to create an asset class for the hospitality industry itself overall. So the potential is immense. It’s about getting the right kind of partners on. 

Robin Trimingham: Overall, I think you and I are going to have to have a future conversation. Just about that last point. I want to thank you so much for your time today. You’ve been watching the innovative hotelier. Join us again soon for more up to the minute information and insights specifically for the hotel and hospitality industry. You’ve been listening to the Innovative Hotelier podcast by Hotels magazine. Join us again soon for more conversations with hospitality industry thought leaders.