Winding Tree, a blockchain-based travel booking system, is shutting down after seven years.
In a letter on its website, CEO Maksim Izmaylov said the decision was driven by the crypto industry’s “unpreparedness and the need for more understanding and trust in blockchains within the travel sector.”
He added that the company had “failed to find a product market fit” and that the industry needs a “coordinated effort of travel companies” to make this sort of initiative work.
Winding Tree did manage to strike up a number of partnerships with airlines including Lufthansa, Air France-KLM and, most recently, American Airlines all working with the company to drive direct distribution.
Meanwhile, Simard, a corporate travel technology provider based on the Winding Tree blockchain marketplace, ceased operations in May. The company was launched in 2021 but was unable to attract sufficient funding to enable it to scale.
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Izmaylov and the team at Winding Tree had been working toward goals laid out in a white paper that addressed what it saw as the weaknesses in the industry and how blockchain could remedy them.
The white paper said, “The consolidated nature of the travel distribution platforms creates a situation where the intermediaries have no incentive to use new technologies. Instead, they spend resources on locking their customers into using systems that were in some cases created decades ago.
“Current archaic technological solutions hinder innovation and create extremely high barriers to entry for new platforms. Blockchain technology allows for a ground layer to be built for a truly free and competitive market in travel distribution.”
In his letter, Izmaylov said that while the timing is not right, the founding team “believes that our ideas hold true.”
In a LinkedIn post, Eric Leopold, founder of travel industry consultancy Threedot, said Winding Tree’s vision was “still valid today.” He added that travel distribution is hard to disrupt between the “strong grip” of incumbents as well as “corporate customers that have delegated travel management and airlines that mostly don’t control their IT anymore.”
Winding Tree founder Pedro Renaud Anderson commented on Leopold’s post saying he hopes “others will take up the torch and build on what we started but weren’t able to finish.”
“To this end we’re working on an academic paper that will take a deeper dive into the journey we embarked on with Winding Tree. We made a lot of mistakes but pioneered a great deal as well. There are many challenges to achieving what we set out to do and the timing wasn’t ideal, but I’m convinced it is not an impossible task.”
