Storytelling and online rights Can Ctrip play NFT overseas?

In the past few years, many commercial brands have emerged in the practice of laying out NFT and digital collections. Many companies look forward to finding growth points beyond traditional businesses by being close to the Web3 group and young audiences. Sadly, most attempts end up being a particularly short-lived marketing campaign that doesn't have chemistry with the actual business.

In the digital age, explorers who want to shape successful transformation cases continue to follow. Ctrip, an online travel service platform, is one of them. Its advantage lies in its relatively comprehensive overseas supplier system, which naturally fits the popularity of NFT overseas.

Two months ago, Trip.com, an international brand of Ctrip Group, announced its NFT plan. Trekki NFT with 10,000 dolphin-like images entrusts its ambition to enter the Web3 field. Ctrip has designed a story about exploration and travel for this NFT series, so that each NFT can follow the holder to evolve during travel, and provide benefits such as discounts and offline activities.

After two months of warm-up and community building, Ctrip's NFT sale event is ready. Based on the failure of many explorers, has Ctrip learned some lessons and experience from it? Will its NFT attempt have a better ending?

Create a world view for NFT

"* In the far west, there is an undiscovered country called Trekia. Here lives a group of 'Trekki', more precisely, dolphinoids creatures.*

*Trekki live by roaming and exploring, and are motivated by the discovery of unknown time and space. After eons of traveling, they have uncovered all the secrets of Trekki, and this is a disaster for the Trekki. *

*Because they feed on discoveries, as humans feed on food and drink, they lose energy to survive without new territories to discover. *

*At this moment, the wandering savior appeared, and under the leadership of the savior, Trekki had the opportunity to cross the end of their world and regain the hope of life. *”

This story is the world view constructed by Ctrip for its first NFT image "Trekki".

At the beginning of June this year, Trip.com, an international brand of Ctrip Group, began to incubate the Trekki NFT project. In the entire NFT collection, there are a total of 10,000 Trekki created in the image of dolphins. Each small dolphin has different decorations and appearances, and will follow future owners The survivors are the "saviors" in the story, traveling together in the new world.

Trekki Story Scenario

There are four series of Trekki NFT, corresponding to different rarities.

Among the 10,000 NFTs, 90% are land travelers. These Trekki have come to different continents of the earth, explored various regions, and experienced different scenery, food and culture; 7% of Trekki are time travelers, and they will join the interstellar Trek, exploring the past and future of the world; only 2.5% of NFTs are space travelers. During the trip, some dolphins have mastered the technology of breaking through space and have reached countless parallel worlds; the most scarce is super Travelers, only 0.5% or 50 Trekki, have transcended the shackles of the world through inner exploration and reached the boundless dharma realm.

Returning from the story to reality, Trekki is essentially a new form of membership benefits for Ctrip. After holding NFT, travel enthusiasts can get exclusive discounts on flights, hotels, attractions and event tickets on Ctrip's global platform. For NFTs with different scarcity, the corresponding rights and interests should also have corresponding differences.

Before the release of NFT, Ctrip built a complete story world around the attributes of its own travel platform, which will help users understand the NFT that appears as a story character, and at the same time facilitate the combination of subsequent NFT gameplay and its own business.

Self-upgrading NFT brings playability

Although Trekki's official website and official social media accounts were opened in June, Ctrip Trip.com did not rush to start the sale, but started a series of warm-up activities to convey the story of Trekki to the outside world.

On overseas social platforms, Trekki operators held multiple online Space exchanges, created a Discord community, and recruited 999 members to join the Trekki Alliance, first creating a community and consensus. To join the alliance, the user needs to indicate the name of the alliance in the suffix of the personal ID and modify the Twitter banner of the prescribed style.

Members who join the alliance also have corresponding rights and interests, including participating in exclusive community gifts, participating in private lottery draws, occasionally receiving surprises and being invited to participate in offline activities. In the alliance, travel enthusiasts from all over the world can communicate with each other and become different characters in the Trekki alliance.

Trekki Community Rules

For more than two months, Trekki NFT's official Twitter has attracted more than 70,000 fans, and tens of thousands of members have gathered in the Discord community. In addition, the Trekki community has also launched creative activities to allow users to create content spontaneously and enrich the community's content ecology.

In terms of NFT design, Ctrip Trip.com also adopted an interesting mechanism. Different from the existing membership benefits, as the holders continue to travel, Trekki will continue to grow and evolve during the journey, from infancy to maturity. This means that every NFT is upgradable.

Ctrip Trip.com not only operates Trekki in the way of "holding the original NFT and airdropping new NFT" which is popular in the NFT application field, but also combines real-life scenarios to allow NFT holders to book air tickets and hotels on the Ctrip platform every time. The "little dolphin" in your hand will grow automatically and unlock more rights and interests.

In addition, Ctrip Trip.com has also added AI capabilities to each NFT, allowing it to act as a travel artificial intelligence assistant. Holders can ask Trekki (supported by ChatGPT) any travel-related questions, such as creating a 5-day itinerary in Japan.

The above gameplay is the fusion of Trekki NFT stories and real travel scenes, and also the combination of Web3 and AI new scenes. It seems that every little dolphin really follows the journey of its owner and grows from constant discoveries. And, with the help of AI, they become assistants in planning trips. Through these designs, the planar NFT faintly becomes vivid and practical.

Practical equity design and possibility of derivation

The interesting storyline and evolution mechanism make Trekki NFT interesting and playable. But in the end, its actual value still depends on the rights and interests that can be landed.

As a travel booking service platform, the most attractive benefits that Ctrip Trip.com can provide are travel discounts and conveniences. In the external publicity, Ctrip Trip.com gave followers a real reason to buy - "save money".

According to reports, each NFT holder can get Trip Coins worth $100, which can be used to enjoy discounts when booking hotels or flights on Trip.com. Holders can also enjoy Platinum membership benefits directly from their Trip.com account, including additional discounts of up to 15%, free room upgrades, late checkouts, and free cancellations at select hotels. As Trekki grows, users will unlock more perks.

Partial Trekki NFT image

In addition, holders can exclusively participate in offline events organized by Trekki or Trip.com, such as music festivals, food carnivals, etc. After obtaining Trekki NFT, holders have the opportunity to receive subsequent NFT airdrops for free, or enjoy the right of first refusal to other NFT projects in the ecosystem. In the near future, Trekki NFT holders will also be able to earn tokens through staking, which can be exchanged for additional benefits.

Trekki NFT is also trying to expand the coverage of rights and interests. According to the disclosure, Trekki will explore cooperation with more brands, including hotels, airlines and tourist attractions, in an effort to provide more benefits to Trekki holders and further strengthen the connection between the digital field and real travel.

Compared with traditional membership cards or vouchers, the form of Trekki NFT adds more gameplay and becomes an independent IP, which helps create a new community culture and even attracts more brands to join. The more important value is that when it is circulated on the chain, this kind of membership rights become digital assets that can be traded and gifted at any time, which means that travel rights have changed from closed to open.

At this point, many derivative possibilities also arise. Trekki NFT can highlight the identity of a traveler and become a social media identity label; content creators can create secondary art based on Trekki NFT, such as making comics, videos or even live broadcasts; NFT holders can also Use Trekki's image to develop apparel, toys, merchandise, and more.

When NFT is bound to physical rights and interests, it has practical value in itself, and it is easier to continue to develop, rather than being ignored after a lot of hype.

Trekki NFT is expected to be released on the Ethereum blockchain in September. Whether Ctrip.com’s attempt can achieve good results remains to be seen. A big uncertainty is that there is still a lot of barriers for domestic Web2 users of Ctrip to enter the Web3 world of Trip.com. In addition to the fact that the two platforms belong to domestic and overseas travel consumers in different regions, how to Registering the wallet on the chain, how to trade NFT and pay the transaction fee on the chain are operational challenges for most domestic users.

If you plan to book an outbound travel itinerary on Trip.com recently, you may wish to pay attention to the NFT series of the platform.

In fact, since 2016, Ctrip has acquired companies such as MakeMyTrip, Skyscanner, and Trip.com to expand into the international market, covering business in about 200 countries around the world. In the first half of 2022, Ctrip ranked among the top 10 global travel app download rankings for the first time. In the Q4 quarter of 2022, Ctrip’s net profit attributable to group shareholders was 1.4 billion yuan, a substantial increase of 355% after turning losses into profits. Part of the growth (traffic) was attributed to a strong recovery in the overseas travel market.

For Ctrip Group's rising overseas performance, Trip.com came up with the NFT plan, intending to consolidate the loyalty of tourism consumers to the brand. With NFT, which is popular overseas, has extensive market education, and has huge transactions The new means of Web3 digitalization in the market gathers traffic, stimulates activity, and boosts the market expansion of Ctrip's overseas business.

The success or failure of Ctrip's Trip.com NFT plan may provide a reference for the transformation of the global online travel booking platform to Web3.

**Are Trekki NFTs attractive to you? **