Travala recently added a fiat gateway to its travel booking platform, as well as announced plans for a traditional equity Series A fundraising round. Travala’s CEO, Matt Luczynksi, made reference to both announcements in a recent interview with Brad Laurie aka Blockchain Brad.

Travala’s public token sale ended in April of 2018, where the company was able to raise US $2.6 million. In mid-2018 the booking platform went live and currently provides access to over 500,000 properties around the world. In his interview with Blockchain Brad, Luczynski iterated Travala has been growing at a “80% month-on-month growth over past few months.”

The platform made 73 bookings in January, more than three times that of December. In addition to increased growth and booking additions, Travala now offers payment options via fiat and more than 45 cryptocurrencies.

As of January 31st, the Travala website provides users with access to payment methods via PayPal, Mastercard, Visa, and AMEX. Fiat payment integration was listed as one of Travala ’s goals for the first quarter of 2019, along with increased marketing and awareness efforts.

To increase the marketing campaign in an “accelerated growth” phase, Travala will seek US $5 million in funding via traditional Series A round. However, in his interview, Luczynski said, “if we’re going for a private round, and offer to private investors, then why not offer to community members as well?”

In addition to the Series A round, Travala will also hold a crowdfunding round for its community members.

Traditional crowdfunding round in conjunction with Series A

Travala is conducting a “crowdfunding round for equity share capital in the company to give the community a chance to be part of [Travala’s] growth.”

In its announcement, Travala released a survey to gather input from community members. Included was information about minimum contribution amounts and the crowdfunding platform. The survey can be found below:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScKm7-glbN-GtOnJ6MQflkaoSDqIFOk63w7AKEVdvJqbN8dyg/viewform

The crowdfunding round will not be a security token offering, nor use a token model. Rather, the crowdfund will use a traditional equity-based model. Where participants will be given shares of Travala, and receive future dividends from projected profits.

Travala aims to allocate 5% of total shares from a newly established “Travala Limited” for crowdfund access. The price has not been set as Travala has yet to finalize its valuation, which will be based on growth projections. Once that has been determined, a cost basis per share will be developed.

However, the share distribution platform that Travala intends to use, Crowdcube, has a minimum contribution rate of US $13. Subsequently, this will be the bare minimum buy-in amount to participate.

With regards to additional fundraising rounds, Luczynski said “it was always part of the plan that we would be having to go for a Series A. We will go for a Series B, we’ll go through a Series C, to drive growth that we know we can achieve. The travel market is so big and the growth we can predict is exponential. So we see more rounds in the future happening with our project.”

The crowdfund round is expected to take place in March of 2019.

Utility of the AVA token

The share-offering and AVA tokens have no correlation or connection with one another, and serve totally separate purposes. The shares will be comprised of traditional (dividend paying) equity held in Travala Limited. Whereas AVA tokens will be used to pay for services on the platform, and to serve as an integral part of the incentives system.

Luczynski said the team took about six months to design an incentives mechanism, which was built around the AVA token. Therefore, users will receive a rewards benefit that has real value. This real value is derived as the AVA token can be traded on an exchange, as opposed to miles, credit card points, or other rewards point systems.

Further, he went on to say Travala’s whole purpose of using AVA (and other cryptocurrencies) is to incentivize widespread adoption by providing “uses cases for cryptocurrency and the people who hold cryptocurrency.”

The link below has more information about the crowdfunding campaign:
https://blog.travala.com/insights-into-the-crowdfunding-campaign/

Tags: