Review of Cool Cousin and how to solve the problem

Today we will talk about the travel industry and what is needed for blocking. Global tourism has changed, when looking at numbers, the Millenials take an average of 2.38 holidays each year, which is 25% more than the previous generation. They also travel differently than the Boomers (born in 1943-1963), rely much more on technology and depend on a shared economy.

Changing the travel industry

The move towards technology adoption has led to a shift in the tourism industry, especially with the advent of applications such as Airbnb and Uber. The vast 2.3 trillion dollars in the global tourism industry are increasingly moving to technology companies, such as TripAdvisor or AirBnB, through traditional travel services such as travel agencies that are slowly being replaced.

This change in the industry underscores how the Millenaries pursue a different travel experience, one that is more experience-oriented and less leisure-oriented. The transition to leave based on experience is explained by two reasons: second information and greater transparency.

In the past, travelers relied on the knowledge and experience of expensive travel agencies to discover the best restaurants or impressions, but this is changing with the advent of review sites such as TripAdvisor. These sites are free of charge and list a vast number of options that far exceed what one travel agent knows. Ultimately, information makes searching for the relevant experience more accessible for travelers, which allows you to create an individual holiday plan yourself.

Problems of the reliability of information sources

Technology-driven journeys are not ideal because free information is very susceptible to manipulation. The success of the company depends on whether it is in the first place in the user's search results. Because this guarantees the success of the company. For example, the search result number one in Google gets an average share of 32.5% of all traffic, while the second result is just over half of 17.6%, and in the tenth place receives only 2.4% of all traffic. Interested parties will choose the best effect, which makes it an incredibly valuable place. From a business perspective, this means that getting a high-ranking result in finding TripAdvisor and maintaining a rating is terribly essential. The reverse side of this aspiration is fake reviews, which is what companies abuse.

In 2017, one of the best restaurants in London on TripAdvisor was named "The Shed at Dulwich". It was "a restaurant only by appointment, which worked privately for many years." The restaurant was highly appreciated by the fake reviews that raised the business to the "coveted restaurant number one" in London. The only problem was that the restaurant never existed. The main problem with aggregation browsing sites is that not all results are reliable, as enterprises are stimulating to increase their ratings and reduce the score of competitors by any possible means. Spending time sorting and searching only for real ratings is expensive and time-consuming, often impossible, and it's too late to catch fake reviews for months because the damage has been done.

Local experts

The ability to manipulate crowdsourcing reviews portends a new shift in the tourism industry. At the forefront, services appear, with an emphasis on reliable advice from local experts coming to the fore that seek to connect travelers with residents. Perhaps one of the most successful new companies to solve this problem is Cool Cousin, a company that aims to create an individual travel experience, linking travelers with local people who share similar interests. In the application of local experts are called cousins.

Millenials travel differently than the previous generation. Instead of looking for a comfortable rest, they seek to gain experience and get closer to the local people. The growth of the economy of sharing through applications demonstrates this shift.

Cool Cousin - a new approach to finding travel

The growth of Cool Cousin has been exponential since it was launched in 2017. The company already has more than half a million travelers using the travel booking application for 70 cities. Over the past six months, the user base has grown by 350%, every five days a new town is being launched, new residents are added daily.

With the desire to find the best experience, the current ways to obtain information are becoming increasingly unreliable, so travelers turn to local resources.

The company consists of 16 people. The content department checks each cousin. But the department is only three people so that a week can accommodate no more than 50-150 cousins. The main problem for the company to stay at the same level of high-quality content with fast scaling. To solve this problem, a blockade suitable for ensuring the intelligent delegation of responsibility and authority to the community is appropriate.

But this is not the only thing that concerns the displacement of Cool Cousin towards the blockade. There is an opportunity for all members of the community to submit and manage content. Suppose a tourist enters a restaurant and discovers that the photos do not reflect the atmosphere of the room. Then he uploads the picture and can get tokens for the best content. One of the advantages of this method is transparency; there is no reason to suspect the content that the user consumes. The community receives tokens in exchange for effort. The symbol provides access to the services of cousins, from the concierge to the compilation of a daily itinerary.

You can also earn tokens by helping the community update the platform, for example, translating or improving content. The mechanism works as follows: for each transaction, a small fee is charged for each service paid to the cousin. Half goes to the company, and the other goes to the community.