This week we spoke with Luca De Giglio, Founder of Trips Community, a decentralized peer to peer booking platform that shifts power away from the platform and into the hands of the hosts and guests who use it.
The Evolution of Booking
In 2001 Luca De Giglio wanted to earn some money to travel the world, so he set up a website to rent apartments—a novel idea at the time. “It was the golden age of Web 1. A person could do something and earn money without relying on a big platform,” he told us. Luca collected apartments, people booked them, and he spent the next 10 years traveling the world. It was a lucrative lifestyle business. We all know what happens next; Web 2 arrived, Airbnb came along with it, and Luca’s business was effectively destroyed. While he tried to adapt by launching a startup that helped hosts work with large booking platforms, he didn’t like the way that hosts were ultimately treated. “I was feeding the beast,” he said, “The people who were doing the real work made less and less money.”
In 2017 Luca discovered Ethereum. Already familiar with Bitcoin, he loved how Ethereum allowed you to do more in the crypto space. He bought some ETH and created a community to work on the whitepaper for a decentralized Airbnb idea called Trips Community. By the time it was ready, the bull run was over. Fortunately, while Trips had no investments , they had no real expenses either; they were able to stay afloat and spend the crypto winter working with their partner, Origin Protocol, building out the software and marketplace for booking apartments. Luca traveled the word again meeting hosts and sharing the idea, only to find that the world wasn’t quite ready. “Our launch was too early—nobody had a wallet, we had to teach hosts about cryptocurrency, and gas fees were too high.” Luca and his team realized that even with the best engineers working on the project, whatever they built was not going to be used right now—the ecosystem needed to be more mature and scalable. “We can’t convert millions of hosts to Web 3, we just have to wait for adoption.”
Building a Community
Upon this realization, Trips decided to focus on community building within the crypto space while waiting for the world to convert to the decentralized web. Luca is generally excited about Web 3 and sees Trips as an experiment in building decentralized communities. “It’s not about collecting money, building a mold, and attacking markets—it’s about people gathering around an idea,” he said. The Trips Discord is home to 15,000 members, (some of whom are just there for the airdrops), but many of whom love the vision and want to try their hand at building something. Fueled by a gnosis safe, Luca is thrilled that their Discord is run by people he has never met and that he is no longer the focal point of the community. They are doing things like rolling out the first NFT travel bookings—NFTs that represent physical trips that you can use, sell, or gift. (The first was a week in a villa in Ibiza, Spain.) “It’s an experiment!” Luca said with excitement. “The community just runs by itself now, I am no longer the gatekeeper.”
Get in Touch
If you want to get involved with Trips Community, head over to their Discord and check out their website. You may even want to bid on their latest NTF booking! Luca also mentioned that he would be happy to share tips with anyone who is building community around a resource and looking for guidance.
Thanks to Trips Community and Luca for your visionary work and participation in the Panvala League community!