BUK NFTs
The fundamental building block of BUK Protocol is the unique room-night NFTs which are generated at the time of room booking and traded subsequently.
Last updated
The fundamental building block of BUK Protocol is the unique room-night NFTs which are generated at the time of room booking and traded subsequently.
Last updated
BUK's NFTs are essentially representations of the hotel room booking voucher. They consist of all important elements of the booking such as:
Hotel and Room details
Check-in and Check-out dates
Price of the NFT [Current Listing price]
When a hotel registers a property with the BUK protocol, it is registered on the blockchain and an ID is assigned to it. Thereafter, the property owner (identified by its Wallet) can add inventory in form of room-nights to be minted.
The BUK protocol follows a lazy-minting strategy wherein, the inventory sits on the storage layer unminted until there is a 'first-buyer' ready to buy the room-night. When the first-buyer makes a payment to buy the NFT, the NFT is minted and deposited in their wallet.
The buyer now can either perform a pre-check-in 48 hours before the check-in or list this NFT for sale. If the NFT is listed for sale, it is again listed on the blockchain available for other buyers to buy at a price chosen by the seller. If the buyer decides to pre-check-in, the NFT is rendered non-transferable and the personal information of the buyer is sent directly to the hotel.
Buyers can keep trading the NFT until the pre-check-in deadline. If the owner of the NFT does not pre-check-in until the pre-check-in deadline, the NFT is still rendered non-transferable at this deadline.
NFTs can be traded on the BUK protocol by simply listing them for sale, and another buyer buying them. All NFTs listed for sale are available on the blockchain. Hotels can set up a minimum resale price for NFTs below which the NFT cannot be listed for sale. However, there is no upper limit for sale of NFTs. When an NFT is traded on the platform, the following payouts are effected:
Hotel gets a commission proportionate to the sale amount - this is currently set at 1% of the sale amount
The first buyer gets a commission proportionate to the sale amount - this is currently set at 0.5% of the sale amount
BUK protocol get paid its protocol fees - this is currently set at 0.5% of the sale amount
Sale price - The seller of the NFT gets the remaining amount (Sale Price - hotel commission - first-buyer commission - BUK platform fees)
When the owner of the NFT wishes to finally stay in the room allotted under the NFT, they can perform a pre-check-in transaction. The pre-check-in is the only function in the BUK protocol which collects any Personal Information. This Personal Information is sent directly to the Hotel, and none of the intermediary wallets or parties involved in trading of the NFT are given a copy.
As explained above, upon pre-check-in, the NFT is rendered non-transferable and can no longer be listed for sale. Also, even if a pre-check-in is not performed, the NFT ceases to be tradable 48 hours prior to check-in time.
After the check-out of the guest, all NFTs shall be converted into non-utility NFTs and continue to live as a collectible with the last owner wallet who ended up utilizing the NFT.
BUK room-night NFTs are currently in their most primitive form - they simply encapsulate information currently present in a hotel booking voucher in form of an NFT. We currently use ERC721 standard for creation of these fundamental NFTs.
While we expect the base room-night NFT to continue to remain as-is, we expect BUK's NFT ecosystem to evolve to support a wider variety of use cases unlocking the potential of tokenization for business and retail users alike. We plan to add support for the ERC1155 standard also, which will provide a wide range of possibilities of exploiting the NFT ecosystem. Some of the current set of ideas on our roadmap include:
Adding fungible NFTs for add-on services like breakfast, meal options or bar access provided by Hotels. These fungible NFTs can be bundled with room-night NFTs to create a value added offering to end customers. What's more, owners of these bundled NFTs can still unbundle them and sell the room-night and value added service NFTs separately on trading platforms.
Fungible room-night tokens is another futuristic idea often discussed on Telegram channels of the BUK team. Not very different from redeemable hotel vouchers issued by hotels under their loyalty programs, Fungible room-night NFTs would not only be capable of being used for any date across a set of eligible dates, with smart contracts they can have appropriate utilization terms made transparent and enforceable. Further, this asset which hitherto is locked inside email accounts of individual users can now be traded transparently.
We believe that room-night bookings as NFTs have a wide variety of use-cases and we are only limited by our imagination about what they can achieve. We'd love to hear more from our community about ideas on evolution of our NFTs - if you have ideas, write to us at hello[at]buk[dot]technology.
BUK envisages that the collectible form of NFTs shall evolve into a separate asset class, which users may not only preserve as a keepsake but may also use for hitherto unimagined functionality. Some of the raw ideas which our band of BUK enthusiasts have suggested are:
Hotels can use these NFTs to communicate with past guests
The NFT can be enriched with photographs of the property taken during the stay and then traded as an Art NFT
NFTs belonging to stay by influencers or celebrities can be traded
We'd love to hear more from our community about ideas on how collectible NFTs can be structured or used. If you have ideas, write to us at hello[at]buk[dot]technology.
By providing for encapsulating value added services as ERC1155 NFTs, BUK will provide support for much touted Attribute based pricing ecosystem for Hotels. (ABP) is a revenue management strategy which has been demanded by the Hotel industry for a long time. However, current hotel technology systems are limited in their ability to support ABP. BUK believes that tokenization of room-nights followed by added support for tokenization of value added services is the first step towards supporting ABP.
