In Q4 2021, cryptocurrencies were riding high while Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta announcement drove every business into a discussion about how they would monetize the metaverse. One year later and this web3 landscape now looks far more fallow. The question for hoteliers: do you react by abandoning your interest in blockchain and metaverse technologies?
Per the title, we caution that hotels take a wiser approach to all new tech. The shiny new tech always gets undue hype, then there’s a correction, and then finally there’s utilization. Right now, we are in the correction phase with of its naysayers in the public sphere spitting on the grave of Meta stock prices while pointing to a few crypto Ponzi schemes as evidence of the whole space as fiction. But there’s light at the end of the tunnel, with real world use cases favoring early adopters.
In the grand, grand, grand scheme of things, all new human inventions in our civilization tend to follow one basic rule: the innovations that increase convenience will eventually become king. We’ve seen this with cars versus horses, with credit cards versus cash and computers versus paper records.
During a positive hype phase, skepticism is a virtue. Likewise during our present-day crypto and metaverse winter, news of their demise are greater exaggerated. Still, there’s a profound lesson from this tech hype ebb and flow that you may apply to any trend affecting the hotel industry.
Namely, ask yourself and your team these three…
