Hahn Air has become the first airline that issued a real-world ticket enabled by blockchain technology on the open-source travel distribution platform Winding Tree. It is also the first airline to fly passengers holding blockchain-powered tickets on its scheduled flight from Dusseldorf to Luxemburg on November 18. The first blockchain passengers were Maksim Izmaylov, Founder of Winding Tree, Davide Montali, CIO of Winding Tree, and Frederick Nowotny, Head of Sales Engineering at Hahn Air. “We at Hahn Air are constantly exploring new technologies and we are proud to now demonstrate our technical capability to issue blockchain-powered Hahn Air tickets. We are pleased to be partnering with Winding Tree, the most established company when it comes to distributing travel inventory in the blockchain. Our goal is to investigate and monitor the opportunities this technology holds for travel distribution, even if widespread acceptance is still a vision of the future,” commented Frederick Nowotny.
The blockchain technology holds many advantages for the different parties involved in the process of booking an airline ticket. It is an open-source, meaning all market participants such as airlines, travel companies and distribution systems can easily connect and exchange transactions. All market participants can directly interact with each other and perform transactions without intermediaries thereby reducing costs. It is 100% secure. All of the necessary information is stored in a decentralised ledger which is verified by millions of sources and therefore cannot be changed or tampered with.