Digital nomads, NFT and One Man’s Quest to build an island oasis for remote work

An entrepreneur gets back on his feet after miscalculating the investment and interest needed to build an eco-lodge on a remote island in Indonesia.

Olumide Gbenro originally planned to sell 5,000 non-fungible tokens (NFTs) at around $500 each to fund the development of a complex designed to meet the needs of remote workers, digital nomads and “location independent investors”. The tokens would have served as a lifetime pass to the private retreat, with price levels for accommodation and food to be set by the new community.

It’s a relatively new and very unconventional way to raise funds, and Gbenro only won $65,000. However, he has now revived the project, scaling it up tenfold, and remains confident that the wider travel industry will ultimately benefit from the NFT craze.

Is it the turn of tourism?

NFTs are becoming popular in the art world, as well as in sports. Each token is a unique digital collectible stored on a blockchain. It is different from cryptocurrency because each has a unique identification code. When you buy one, there is a permanent record of ownership and digital proof of where it came from.

The National Basketball Association uses them to sell trading cards through its NBA Top Shot platform, while some football clubs, including Manchester City, sell tokens to fans. They can also be traded after purchase, on marketplaces like OpenSea and Rarible.

While a luxury hotel in Venice uses NFTs to auction an overnight stay, they are not commonly used in the travel industry. Gbenro thinks his attempt is the first.

“I haven’t seen anyone do it that way. There’s no plan, that’s why I screwed up,” he said. ” It was hard. It somehow failed, or didn’t work so well. I wanted to run away and say forget it, but people around me say I couldn’t do that, let’s find another way.

Essentially, Bali-based Gbenro is using NFTs to outsource station development, and for his second attempt, he’s aiming to sell 500 NFTs, at around $2,500 each, raising $1.25 million to develop Nomada on Buka Buka, in partnership with local developer Thomas Despin, among others. “I realized that for an island, it’s not very smart to send 5,000 people there,” he added.

He also has a second project called the Wealthy Island Penguin Club in place, a holdover from the original initiative, for which he still plans to sell 5,000 NFTs, but to a different audience of people in the NFT and cryptocurrency communities. It would act more like a “business club” and eventually tie into access to Nomada.

lessons to come

Gbenro is no stranger to the travel industry, having founded Digital Nomad Week and other events, as well as contributing to lobbying efforts for a digital nomad visa for the country. He’s confident that if he can make Nomada work, he’ll prove the case for a “new model of distributed living” – but acknowledges it will take time.

“It could take a few months or a few years to realize the dream, that’s OK. That’s why I’m back and relaunching,” he said. He also thinks major hotel brands should consider NFTs to appeal to a younger audience.

“These companies are stuck in their old ways,” he said. “I don’t know what they’re doing to say ‘let’s adapt to the future’ because we know tourism has changed. It’s never going to be the same. People aren’t just going to show up and say ‘I want to see the sights. Hotels and travel companies need to start catering to people who are constantly on the move and meeting their needs.”

While cryptocurrency is seen by many as the Wild West of payments, the new technology and markets surrounding NFTs have an image problem. Many programs seem loaded with high risk or are promoted by celebrities, and there are questions about how serious a long-term investment of an NFT really is. But among the get-rich-quick scams are “names” that help NFTs be taken more seriously.

Gbenro said some of entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk’s projects highlight the convenience of NFTs, where tokens can give owners access to exclusive events. He reportedly won tens of millions of dollars by “minting” chips. “If people show up to a conference with a token, we’re halfway there,” Gbenro said.

Traditional hotel brands should consider NFTs in the same vein and create special membership cards or loyalty cards for guests, or use them to provide perks, and at the same time raise equity, Gbenro added. According to a report, 84% of investors would consider buying a luxury vacation experience as an NFT to use or sell when tourism picks up. “They could launch an NFT project, generate millions of dollars with their famous brand. They could send it to their mailing list. I don’t know why they don’t,” he said.

For now, expect to see fringe brands forging more hotel tech-based alliances, like Crystal Bay and Beowulf Blockchain in Vietnam, and continuing the experiments. In the current climate, the pace of digitalization in the tourism industry is not slowing down any time soon.

Notes

Like the Indonesian Virgin Islands, nothing will be off limits to remote workers in the future.

Speaking at Skift’s Design the Future event last week, we learned how a photography museum was attracting people looking for quiet spaces to Zoom. Fotografiska merged with co-working space provider NeueHouse in March this year, and it is opening three museum locations in Stockholm, New York and Tallinn

“We’re thinking of a work space and a social space in a museum…it’s been a fascinating journey and the design is at the heart of it,” said Jon Goss, its chief brand officer, at the event in line.

With places and spaces open to new kinds of interpretation, design should be more important than ever. So I have a few questions about exactly how a workspace in a train station, next to a store, works.

Accor’s coworking brand, Wojo, has opened a space next to a Relay store in Annemasse, eastern France. It may not be as quiet or elegant as a museum, but for the remote worker who needs to travel to Geneva, it ticks all the function boxes. And the beauty of being in the same building as a newsagent is that you probably won’t run out of pens.

Speaking at the Skift Live event, Glos brought up an interesting point that Zoom has accelerated the amount of noise we have to deal with, definitely a problem for a museum. So there was talk of an alliance with Design Hotels, so NeueHouse members could access the luxury hotel collective’s extensive range of properties to find a different place to work.

There are already plenty of third parties stepping in and joining the dots between different luxury and lifestyle hotels that can offer coworking spaces, but there are good reasons for hotels to put rivalries aside and join forces. associate with like-minded properties.

10 second catch up on business trips

Who and what Skift has covered over the past week: Airbnb, Amazon, AvantStay, Best Western, diversity, equity and inclusion, Heathrow airport, hotel rates, IAG, Saber, TripActions, United Airlines, Virgin Atlantic.

In short

Australia’s CTM buys Helloworld’s business and entertainment assets for $125

travel management company CM is to buy 100 percent of Hi worldAustralia and New Zealand’s business travel and entertainment business for approximately $125 million (A$175 million). inbound destination management services, airline ticket consolidation, wholesale travel services and online operations. Completion of the acquisition is expected to occur in the first quarter of next year. CTM acquired the American company Travel and Transport for $195 million in September 2020.

GlobalStar expands UK reach with agency partnership

GlobalStar Travel Management has partnered with the British company travel consultants‘ business travel division. GlobalStar operates in 3,500 locations in 85 countries, and the strategic agreement strengthens its “benchmark” strength in the UK, one of its key driving markets, according to GlobalStar CEO James Stevenson. Travel Counselors has 1,900 franchisees in six countries. The UK is its main market, but it also operates in Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates.

Winding Tree Adds Industry Executives to Payments and Services Branch

travel market winding tree strengthened its Simard services and payments division with a trio of new recruits. Don Birch, who founded Abacus and most recently worked at Traxo, now becomes CEO of Simard, while Mathieu Tahon joins as chief technology officer, after working at Amadeus, et. Bill Hogate joins as vice president of North American sales and account management. He has held positions at Frasca International, Lumo and CorpTrav in the past. Simard said it acts as a technical support service provider to those who need help when joining the Winding Tree block-chan-based marketplace, which connects corporate customers directly to travel providers. . Winding Tree currently works with EY and American Airlines.

The Future of Work briefing will not be released over the festive period — but we will be back after New Years on Jan 7th.