Driving Adoption via Travel D'Apps

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem.

We intend to create a Travel DAO that sustainably sends its members on free or discounted trips using community resources, i.e travel bursaries, community purchased real estate & tented experiences.

[GENERAL] Summarize your relevant experience.

The developers working on this project are qualified and have experience in contributing to & designing membership products (6 years), building DApps (4 years) and creating animated content to support conveying complex messaging (10+ years).

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

Introduction

Travel & Tourism is one of the largest industries in the world, as it contributes towards 10.3% of global GDP and employs roughly 300 million people (World Travel & Tourism Council, 2021). We believe that the industry presents a large opportunity for Cardano to gain mass adoption, not only because of the industry's size but also because of the level of consumer interest in the sector.

That being said, accessibility to travel is a problem. At the very peak of travel in 2019, only 18.9% of the world’s population travelled abroad (Statista, 2022); and if we were to use America as the marker, who are largely considered to be among the most well-travelled citizens, only four in ten U.S natives planned a trip locally or otherwise in 2019 (AAA Travel Survey, 2019).

If we were to provide a solution that boasts being able to send people on free &/or discounted vacations, what would that do for real world interest in, and adoption for Cardano?

A lot!

How will the Travel Club Work?

We intend to contribute to the solution of accessible travel using three models:

Model A - From membership/NFT sales, the Travel Club/DAO will allocate 12.5% of earnings towards travel bursaries. Bursaries are distributed via a smart contract that executes decisions based on a relative majority vote from the community. The idea here is that the least fortunate will get the chance to vacation, all expenses paid, up to the ADA equivalent of $1800 USD. This is so as to be more inclusive and offer the kind of leverage needed to get the mainstream travel media & community's attention.

Model B - After being funded by Catalyst & establishing proof of concept, the idea is to allocate funds from utility token sales, to acquire beach front property (approximately 36 acres) in Jamaica, to build out an eco friendly experience that is both self sustaining (as rooms will be sold to travelers outside the community) and member-rewarding, as there will be dedicated accommodation, set up for member use (for free).

The intention is also to optimize the model so that rooms sold or rented to the wider public can cover expenses and allow for member-allotted accommodation to remain free, or at worst, discounted. Additionally, the average occupancy rate is approximately 70%; and so with proper planning, that additional room space can also be given to the community.

A further 12.5% of membership/NFT sales will be allocated towards adding rooms each year.

Model C - The intent is to create an ecofriendly, tented experience, outside of the more traditional accommodation-set up alluded to in Model B, to facilitate both an authentic close to nature/fire side experience, as well as allow for the model to accommodate scaling, and member adoption models that exceed 1.22%. That is, we will eventually be able to accommodate every member in the unlikely event that all members want to claim the benefit (discounted vacations) in the same year. It also means that the Travel Club will be able to grow revenue at a rate that is higher than the growth rate of its costs when it sells the tented experiences to the wider public.

Who Benefits from the Travel Club?

Our stakeholders are as follows:

Creator-Caretaker (short term)/ Project Vendor (Long term) - Yaad Labs Ltd (The founding Team)

Members (Phase 1 & 2) - Persons that purchase a travel pass and/or a utility token (To comprise of mostly the Cardano NFT & wider Cardano Community in the short run)

Members (Phase 3) - Persons that purchase a travel pass and/or a utility token (To comprise of mostly persons from the broader travel community, outside of Cardano, in the medium to long term)

Customers - Persons who want to book our experiences (non-members)

Project Partners - Persons who share in the mission of affordable travel

Vendors - To assist with smart contract development & audits

What are the outputs?

In summary the outputs will be:

Short term & with Catalyst Funding

• Base Code for A D'app - to manage elements of the onboarding & governance experience
• Content

Medium term & with the funds earned from future sales

• Acquisition of property
• Boutique Hostel Experience
• Tented Experiences

Conclusion

With this plan, we can achieve a first-of-its-kind, token-gated travel club, that is self sustaining, eco-friendly, community led, and that contributes to accessible travel and ultimately, real world adoption for Cardano!

References

Edmonds, E. (2019). AAA: Nearly 100 Million Americans Will Embark on Family Vacations this Year: Retrieved from: https://newsroom.aaa.com/2019/03/100-million-americans-will-embark-on-family-vacations/

Statista. (2022). Number of international tourist arrivals worldwide from 1951 to 2021. Retrieved from: https://www.statista.com/statistics/209334/total-number-of-nternational-tourist-arrivals/

World Travel & Tourism Council. (2021). Global Economic Impact & Trends. Retrieved from:https://wttc.org/Portals/0/Documents/Reports/2021/Global%20Economic%20Impact%20and%20Trends%202021.pdf

[IMPACT] Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.

Addressing the Aims

The challenge described Cardano as needing a thriving ecosystem of different Dapps, products and integrations for the community to use, that increasingly become the better alternatives over current centralized providers. We provide this in the form of a Travel DAO (managed by a DApp), that does more for members than its centralized counterparts, that just offer discounts to their members.

We are the superior option in the following ways:

• We offer travel grants to members of up to $1800 USD (selected by the community & dispersed via smart contracts)
• Our membership passes have more affordable entry point prices
• Our membership passes are for a lifetime and not for a set, short term period
• Our membership passes are tradable on secondary markets like jpg.store (which offers members an opportunity to opt out should they chose to leave the club)
• Our travel club indexes the same values of Cardano: inclusive accountability, governance, & decentralization - i.e members can check the movement of value for themselves, actively participate in the direction of the DAO, & via its tokenomics, ensure a fair distribution of the DAO's governance & utility tokens

We also provide an interesting solution, which gives ADA holders and outsiders more reason to engage with the Cardano blockchain, which ultimately drives adoption.

Requirements

Existing products or integrations

What products or integrations already exist in the ecosystem?

Thanks to ADAO, its contributors & the broader community, there are open source options like Agora that we may soon be able pull from to aid in development.

What are the core differences between the proposal being presented and those existing ones and why will that provide impact to the ecosystem?

Our offering is appealing to outsiders (the travel community), and so our prospects for gaining interest & onboarding new people into the ecosystem are higher than most other projects.

Technical requirements

Does the Cardano ecosystem have the right tools, libraries and SDKs for the idea to be feasible?

In short, it does & wherever there are deficiencies, we intend to build.

What needs to be introduced or improved for the proposal to fully reach its potential?

In the medium term, fiat enabled NFT purchases, to aid in reducing the friction for outsiders to participate.

Ecosystem maturity requirements

Why is this product or integration suitable for execution right now?

With the increased easing of world wide travel restrictions, we expect a continuation of a vibrant rebound of the Travel & Tourism industry; and could benefit from the uptick in interest. And even with a bearish outlook, history has proven that travel always rebounds after pandemics, economic downturns etc.

A downturn is not a reason to stop building; market conditions will change, they almost always do.

Additionally, the more open source code for DAO's on Cardano, the better.

Are there enough pieces of infrastructure, applications or other integrations available that would be needed for this suggested proposal to have a strong chance of gaining adoption? For instance, if you were making a professional social network DApp, do the right identity tools and wallets exist to make a professional network feasible?

In short, yes. And in the medium term, if options don't become available, we intend to build them to support the broader vision.

[IMPACT] What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?

The main risks & how we plan to mitigate against them are as follows:

Price of ADA - To mitigate against sharp declines in ADA relative to USD, we intend to hold some fiat as well as stables, & where possible, work with contractors who see 1 ADA as 1 ADA

Poor economic conditions - Depending on the extremity, we may alter the tokenomics of the release or spend more time refining the product until we either find our bear market "bulls" or there's a shift in broader market sentiment

Exploits - We intend on open sourcing the project, doing an internal audit, a third party audit (who was not involved with development) & a bug bounty

Unfavorable Regulation - The project is based in Jamaica & the regulatory environment is more relaxed here.

Furthermore, we intend to sell membership NFTs & utility tokens with a governance focus (not a security), as the idea is for us to collaboratively & sustainably build this solution as a community.

Product market fit - We have an outline as to who our ideal real world customer might be - a 33 year old technologically savvy, North-American woman, who spends her time on travel deal sites; the idea however, is to "A B test" target groups & collect feedback until we find our "forever customer".

Bad actors (Both internal & external)

• The DAO is token gated and will leverage CAPTCHA
• Travel requests will require a no-name but face included video submission
• Travel requests have to be sponsored before they are sent for a community vote, meaning, community members, as well as a committee member, must pass the request before the wider community can vote to issue a bursary
• The funds in the travel bursary wallet cannot be withdrawn or dispersed independently of the smart contract. That is, the travel request and its dispersal must be decided on via a community vote.
• In the case of the "petty cash" wallet, decisions will be made by sub guilds (made up of the community) and executed by the main guild (which is made up of both doxxed creators & community members with reputational risk).
• Should a mandate from the sub-guild ever be determined to be malicious, the proposal will be put to the community and require a quorum vote.
• The intent is also to explore options to restrict voting to 1 vote per wallet and/or implement a managed weighted voting process for wallets of certain sizes

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed plan, including timeline and key milestones for delivering your proposal.

Key Milestones

Short term (In part, with Catalyst Funding)

• Hiring & Vendor Onboarding - Month 1
• Forming Key Partnerships - Month 1-3
• Content Creation - Month 2-4 & Onwards
• DApp Development & Testing - Month 1-3
• DApp Audit 3-4

Medium term

• NFT Launch/Membership Sales - Month 4-5
• DAO Seeding - Month 5
• Seed Ventures & Implement Key Features - Month 5 & Onwards
• Sub Guild Formation - Month 5-6
• DAO Opens up for Travel Requests - Month 6
• First set of Travel Grants are issued - Month 6 & Onwards
• Utility Token Sales - Month 7-9
• Acquisition - Month 10-12
• Community Governance starts - Month 13 & Onwards
• Optimizations - Month 14-19 & Onwards
• Marketing Campaign - Month 20

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

Budget (Use of Catalyst Funding over 4 Months)

Labour

Project Lead

$4,000

Tech Lead

$4,000

Creative Lead

$2,667

Development

Smart Contract Development

$27,500

Content

Animation (Preproduction work – Scripting, Fun Pack Planning, Story Boards, Animatics, Rigging etc.) 

$9,900

Animation (Preproduction work, Animatics, Voice Acting, BG Designs, Cut-out style Animations & Composer Editor)

$20,000

Miscellaneous

$1,933

Total

$70,000 USD

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide details of the people who will work on the project.

Meet the team

Jaymeon Jones - Project Management

Education: MSc in Management Studies with a focus in Marketing - Distinction

BSc in Marketing & Economics

Certifications in Digital Marketing, Social Media & Content Marketing

Experience: Eight years of experience in Marketing, Project Management & Product Development with most of it in Finance & Membership based products

Accolades: JN Groups Marketer of the Year

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaymeon-jones-8a55968b/

Randy Burrell - Technical Lead

Education: BSc in Computer Science

Experience: Over seven years of experience as an Engineer

Accolades: Held roles as VP of Engineering & Lead Engineer for several International Web 3 companies

https://www.linkedin.com/in/randyburrell/

Alwayne White - Creative Lead

Education - Professionally Certified Animator

Experience - Over 10 years of experience in animation & studio leadership

Accolades - Regarded as a Pioneer in the Caribbean Animation Industry & selected to represent the region at several global events

[FEASIBILITY] If you are funded, will you return to Catalyst in a later round for further funding? Please explain why / why not.

Further Funding?

If we return to catalyst or not depends on our success with other methods of alternative financing. We hope to apply for a few more grants locally (in Jamaica), if we are unsuccessful, we would submit a follow up proposal to cover things like marketing, development & "run way" for labor, professional fees & administrative costs.

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or any member of your team working on any other proposals in this Fund9?

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or your team working on any other proposals from previous Funds?

[AUDITABILITY] Please describe what you will measure to track your project's progress, and how will you measure these?

Tracking progress

In the short term (using catalyst funds), progress will be tracked by deliverables:

• Hires
• Partnerships
• Code
• Content

In the medium to long term, progress will be measured by KPIs:

• Community Size
• Number of Members sent on Free or Discounted Vacations
• Engagement (Voting Members & Discord Activity)
• Sentiment (How members feel about the product/DAO)
• Revenue

[AUDITABILITY] What does success for this project look like?

What does success looks like?

In the short term, a working Dapp to govern the DAO & a project that is operationally ready to launch phase 1 - sending a fixed set of members on free vacations via relative majority voting.

Over the long term (a 15 year time horizon), to have onboarded hundreds of thousands of travelers to Cardano and to have the capacity to offer free or discounted trips to 170,000 of them in any given year.

[AUDITABILITY] Please provide information on whether this proposal is a continuation of a previously funded project in Catalyst or an entirely new one.

It is an entirely new project

This is not a continuation of any project whatsoever.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Rating

SDG goals:

Goal 8. Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all

Goal 9. Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation

SDG subgoals:

8.9 By 2030, devise and implement policies to promote sustainable tourism that creates jobs and promotes local culture and products

9.2 Promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and, by 2030, significantly raise industry’s share of employment and gross domestic product, in line with national circumstances, and double its share in least developed countries

Key Performance Indicator (KPI):

8.9.1 Tourism direct GDP as a proportion of total GDP and in growth rate

#proposertoolsdg