Every evening for the last week, the Smith family have been sitting around the dinner table together. It’s time to plan next summer’s holiday. The four of them haven’t decided yet where they want to go – but Alexa will help. The Amazon voice assistant inspires them – by telling the parents and children interesting facts about destinations across the world as well as travel offers that might be just perfect for them: “The Spanish island of Majorca is home to the amazing Caves of Drach. These 4 huge cave chambers have millennia-old stalactites and stal­agmites with names like the Buddha or Snowy Mountain. In the last cavern you can take a boat ride on one of the world’s biggest underground lakes, Lake Martel, while musicians provide live music.”

This interaction with the cloud-based Ama­zon service is happening on millions of speakers around the world and in dozens of different languages thanks to what we call “skills” – rather like apps for smart phones or tablets. There are currently about 50,000 of these on the market, most of them specialising in themes like music, news or cinema films. TUI has designed and tested three of these skills for the travel market. The Smiths are using TUI Travel News to find out more about destinations around the globe. And for money-saving inspiration they go to TUI Deals – an application with up-to-date TUI deals, discount codes, and ongoing offers like free kids’ places. These skills are also linked to the Alexa smart phone app, and create special ‘cards’ inside that app, so that the family can read more info, view pictures, and book what Alexa told them about.

Once the family have booked their trip, they can use the TUI Holiday Countdown skill. Every day, as their departure draws closer, they can then get new practical and inspirational advice from Alexa to feel prepared for their holiday and look forward to it even more. “Only six days until your flight to Majorca,” says the voice assistant, as the Smiths relax in the evening, and – after giving them a very practical preparation tip first – surprises them with an inspirational tip for their destination: “You really must try the ensaïmadas, a sweet bun that comes with different fillings. You might like to take some home for your friends afterwards. Up until two days before departure you can still add extra luggage to your flight booing. Find out how to do this on today’s Alexa card.”

Island tours and city walks, rambles and diving courses, desert safaris: the accompanying programme is at least as important to a great holiday these days as the hotel, beach and pool. To identify and perfect these experiences for the customer, TUI Destination Experiences has teamed up with TUI Group’s Blockchain Lab to devise an innovative IT solution based on blockchain technology, which will make it faster and more flexible to use.

TUI Destination Experiences works with thousands of tour guides, sports instructors and entertainment agencies. In the past, their offerings have always been entered manually into the database for the portal gotui.com that customers use for bookings. However, having to perform this stage of the operation has always held things up to some extent. “We aim to achieve real-time operation,” says Martin Schreck, Chief Information Officer for Contracting & Inventory. If the weather forecast looks good, for instance, and a guide decides at short notice to organise a hike the next morning to a scenic spot, he can post that on the supplier platform. “The portal has an interface linking it to the customer booking platform. The hike will appear there automatically, and our customers can spontaneously sign up.”

Blockchain technology has a major advantage here compared with conventional, stationary databases. It is decentralised, and all the information is saved on the computers of all its users and automatically updated. But it is not only customers who will benefit. The new system entails a huge efficiency gain for TUI too, because staff will no longer have to spend a lot of time administering and transmitting data. At the same time, blockchain technology generates transparency between TUI and companies all over the world who organise excursions and events. Both parties have permanent access to the virtual contracts and the latest details, and suppliers can even adapt their products and prices whenever they want. “The pilot project for this new solution was launched in autumn on the Canary Isles,” Martin Schreck reveals. “As soon as the system is running stably we can quickly implement it in other destinations too.”

For holiday makers, blockchain doesn’t change anything. They book their activities the usual way via the website or the TUI app. For suppliers, the system is equally simple: they can register on the platform within minutes and list their tours. Over the next few months and years – Schreck and his team have no doubt – TUI will win over more suppliers to participate in this state-of-the-art, uncomplicated solution. The network will constantly expand – and so too will the diversity of choice available to customers.

Blockchain has already been put to extremely effective use in a different project: since 2016 TUI has been exchanging bed quotas between subsidiaries in different markets using an application that stores all these transactions in the blockchain. Occupancy rates have risen considerably ever since. If TUI Germany, for example, has some free capacity in a hotel on Majorca, our company in the UK can tap into it and offer its own customers the rooms they are looking for. In the old days, it was not that easy to transfer unoccupied beds to a different company – with the bizarre consequence that customers were unable to book a hotel even though it still had free capacity.

At present, only TUI staff can access the blockchain to exchange bed quotas, but the project at TUI Destination Experiences is now allowing external partners onto the decentralised platform. This is an absolute first in the industry, and while it opens up plenty of opportunities, it also presents TUI with enormous challenges: “We have to treat our partners’ data in strict confidence and make sure that critical business process are unseen,” says Martin Schreck. “Although on blockchain everyone can tell which supplier is organising which excursion on TUI’s behalf, the confidential details are only ever visible to the two contracting parties.”

For TUI, the next step towards a big, decentralised network is to acquire experience. Then these smart contracts – which are blockchain transactions – will also be used for working with hotels and airlines. “This is still a very young technology and we learn more from every project,” comments Martin Schreck. “But the idea for the future is to let all this grow into a self-expanding tourism network.”