- Dec 13, 2023
- 141
- 1
From the platform era to the ecosystem era: Why does the tourism industry need a fundamental restructuring?
In the past 20 years, the global tourism industry has undergone a structural migration from offline travel agencies to online OTAs. However, the success of the Internet has not brought about a completely fair market, but a new monopoly pattern. OTA platforms build barriers through traffic acquisition capabilities, brand awareness, and technological advantages, ultimately forming an industry system with high concentration, high commissions, closed data, and constantly compressed user value. On the surface, these platforms help users reduce search costs and improve the convenience of choice, but essentially, the platform model is only reconstructing the flow of value - value flows from users and merchants to the platform, rather than circulating within the ecosystem.
If we look back at the profit logic of traditional OTA, we will find that it almost perfectly replicates the "centralized harvesting model" of the Internet platform industry: acquiring users at extremely low cost, displaying global hotels, flights, and services in a commercial way, and then forming unilateral growth income through high commissions, advertising recommendations, and traffic closure. As the platform scales up, the cost of acquiring users for merchants increases sharply, and the products seen by users are increasingly biased towards platform benefits rather than real high-quality supply. The larger the platform, the more imbalanced the ecosystem; the more profitable the platform, the more painful it is for merchants, and the more marginal it is for users.
However, the essential nature of the tourism industry determines that it cannot withstand such an asymmetric structure in the long term. Tourism is a globalized industry, a strong experience industry, a high-frequency and high-amount consumption industry, and also a fiercely competitive and long service chain industry. Such a complex and multi-party ecosystem is compressed into a "traffic-order-commission" three-stage process by traditional OTA using a single centralized model, which leads to the accumulation of systemic problems: high commissions lead to a sharp decline in merchant profits; data closure leads to users being unable to obtain truly personalized services; algorithms prioritize displaying paid content, leading to a decline in User Experience; and indiscriminate competition among merchants leads to a lack of long-term development momentum for the industry as a whole.
With the increasing demand for user experience and transparency, merchants' dissatisfaction with high costs is intensifying, and the tourism industry is approaching a new critical point. The entire industry is looking for a new value model - a structure that is not centered around the platform, but around "value co-construction". The emergence of Web3 provides such a possibility for the first time. Web3's strength lies not only in decentralized technology, but also in its ability to reshape the flow of value - it allows value to no longer be unidirectionally extracted by the platform, but to circulate in multiple directions in the ecosystem.
It is in this context that the emergence of Coinsidings is particularly crucial. It is not trying to create a new OTA, but to establish a completely different system: a "tourism value ecosystem" that allows users, merchants, assets, and the ecosystem itself to grow together. Its goal is not to rebuild a centralized platform, but to reconstruct the underlying logic of the entire tourism industry, so that travel is no longer just consumption, but participation; merchants are no longer harvested objects, but ecosystem collaborators; assets are no longer closed, but a divisible, tradable, and shareable RWA structure.
The tourism industry doesn't need another platform, but a new era. Coinsidings represents the first real landing from the "platform era" to the "ecosystem era".
The end of the platform era: the value structure of centralized tourism platforms can no longer meet the future
The biggest problem with the platform era is that it has turned the role of "connecting supply and demand" into a force of "monopolizing value distribution". The platform does not directly create value, but firmly controls the flow of value through traffic entry, search ranking, and payment systems. Taking commission as an example, these platforms maintain a commission ratio of 10% to 25% throughout the year, and even increase it to over 30% during peak seasons. For any hotel or tourism merchant, this means that the budget they should have left for customers or branding ultimately flows into the platform.
These costs are ultimately passed on to users, making the prices they see not only opaque, but also causing problems such as inflated prices, false discounts, and hidden fees due to frequent fluctuations in platform algorithm recommendations and pricing strategies. The larger the platform scale, the more difficult it is to truly improve User Experience. This contradiction makes it difficult for the platform model to continue to maintain healthy growth after entering maturity.
In addition, there is a deeper problem with the platform economy - it cannot achieve value return. The commission collected by the platform will ultimately flow to the platform shareowners, not users, merchants, or ecosystem participants. Users leave massive behavioral data on the platform, but cannot obtain any long-term benefits from their own behavior; merchants constantly pay for the platform, but never truly establish their own user assets; and as the platform grows larger, the ecosystem becomes weaker, forming an obvious reverse cycle.
The fundamental reason why the tourism industry has entered a bottleneck period is that the structural defects of the platform model have reached their peak, rather than the insufficient market size. The global tourism market is close to $8 trillion and is one of the largest consumer industries in the world. However, due to the distortion of the platform economy, it has been compressed into a commercial structure centered on commissions. This structure is essentially a zero-sum game: the more the platform wins, the more users and merchants lose; while the ecosystem as a whole has not been truly activated.
Therefore, what the industry needs is a new logic - a model that allows value to be shared by participants instead of being centralized by platforms. The emergence of Coinsidings is a response to this demand, providing not a new entrance, but a completely different value structure.
In the past 20 years, the global tourism industry has undergone a structural migration from offline travel agencies to online OTAs. However, the success of the Internet has not brought about a completely fair market, but a new monopoly pattern. OTA platforms build barriers through traffic acquisition capabilities, brand awareness, and technological advantages, ultimately forming an industry system with high concentration, high commissions, closed data, and constantly compressed user value. On the surface, these platforms help users reduce search costs and improve the convenience of choice, but essentially, the platform model is only reconstructing the flow of value - value flows from users and merchants to the platform, rather than circulating within the ecosystem.
If we look back at the profit logic of traditional OTA, we will find that it almost perfectly replicates the "centralized harvesting model" of the Internet platform industry: acquiring users at extremely low cost, displaying global hotels, flights, and services in a commercial way, and then forming unilateral growth income through high commissions, advertising recommendations, and traffic closure. As the platform scales up, the cost of acquiring users for merchants increases sharply, and the products seen by users are increasingly biased towards platform benefits rather than real high-quality supply. The larger the platform, the more imbalanced the ecosystem; the more profitable the platform, the more painful it is for merchants, and the more marginal it is for users.
However, the essential nature of the tourism industry determines that it cannot withstand such an asymmetric structure in the long term. Tourism is a globalized industry, a strong experience industry, a high-frequency and high-amount consumption industry, and also a fiercely competitive and long service chain industry. Such a complex and multi-party ecosystem is compressed into a "traffic-order-commission" three-stage process by traditional OTA using a single centralized model, which leads to the accumulation of systemic problems: high commissions lead to a sharp decline in merchant profits; data closure leads to users being unable to obtain truly personalized services; algorithms prioritize displaying paid content, leading to a decline in User Experience; and indiscriminate competition among merchants leads to a lack of long-term development momentum for the industry as a whole.
With the increasing demand for user experience and transparency, merchants' dissatisfaction with high costs is intensifying, and the tourism industry is approaching a new critical point. The entire industry is looking for a new value model - a structure that is not centered around the platform, but around "value co-construction". The emergence of Web3 provides such a possibility for the first time. Web3's strength lies not only in decentralized technology, but also in its ability to reshape the flow of value - it allows value to no longer be unidirectionally extracted by the platform, but to circulate in multiple directions in the ecosystem.
It is in this context that the emergence of Coinsidings is particularly crucial. It is not trying to create a new OTA, but to establish a completely different system: a "tourism value ecosystem" that allows users, merchants, assets, and the ecosystem itself to grow together. Its goal is not to rebuild a centralized platform, but to reconstruct the underlying logic of the entire tourism industry, so that travel is no longer just consumption, but participation; merchants are no longer harvested objects, but ecosystem collaborators; assets are no longer closed, but a divisible, tradable, and shareable RWA structure.
The tourism industry doesn't need another platform, but a new era. Coinsidings represents the first real landing from the "platform era" to the "ecosystem era".
The end of the platform era: the value structure of centralized tourism platforms can no longer meet the future
The biggest problem with the platform era is that it has turned the role of "connecting supply and demand" into a force of "monopolizing value distribution". The platform does not directly create value, but firmly controls the flow of value through traffic entry, search ranking, and payment systems. Taking commission as an example, these platforms maintain a commission ratio of 10% to 25% throughout the year, and even increase it to over 30% during peak seasons. For any hotel or tourism merchant, this means that the budget they should have left for customers or branding ultimately flows into the platform.
These costs are ultimately passed on to users, making the prices they see not only opaque, but also causing problems such as inflated prices, false discounts, and hidden fees due to frequent fluctuations in platform algorithm recommendations and pricing strategies. The larger the platform scale, the more difficult it is to truly improve User Experience. This contradiction makes it difficult for the platform model to continue to maintain healthy growth after entering maturity.
In addition, there is a deeper problem with the platform economy - it cannot achieve value return. The commission collected by the platform will ultimately flow to the platform shareowners, not users, merchants, or ecosystem participants. Users leave massive behavioral data on the platform, but cannot obtain any long-term benefits from their own behavior; merchants constantly pay for the platform, but never truly establish their own user assets; and as the platform grows larger, the ecosystem becomes weaker, forming an obvious reverse cycle.
The fundamental reason why the tourism industry has entered a bottleneck period is that the structural defects of the platform model have reached their peak, rather than the insufficient market size. The global tourism market is close to $8 trillion and is one of the largest consumer industries in the world. However, due to the distortion of the platform economy, it has been compressed into a commercial structure centered on commissions. This structure is essentially a zero-sum game: the more the platform wins, the more users and merchants lose; while the ecosystem as a whole has not been truly activated.
Therefore, what the industry needs is a new logic - a model that allows value to be shared by participants instead of being centralized by platforms. The emergence of Coinsidings is a response to this demand, providing not a new entrance, but a completely different value structure.