Innovation Lab

On August 26, the Web3 Travelers community organized the first dinner in Slovenia using non-fungible tokens as tickets.

The event took place in a restaurant called EDEN in Žiri, Slovenia. As the name suggests, we enjoyed it in a paradise-like garden while the renowned chef Tadej Kržišnik and his team made sure our culinary horizons expanded. Besides the excellent culinary delights, the evening was full of inspirational talks about Web3.

The 17-course dinner was sold out. Guests paid a total of 1 Ether for the 10 tickets (at the time of writing, that’s just under €1,600).

The successfully implemented project represents one of the first important Slovenian and international steps in exploring the opportunities that new crypto technologies, such as NFT, bring to the hospitality industry. The sold-out dinner proves that there is already a new segment of consumers in Slovenia who use Web3 services and who are striving for its decentralization, transparency and democratization.

In the course of the project, more protocols and transactions were implemented and tested with the dinner participants, which will serve as an excellent example of good practice for all partners involved, both in the development of new similar products and in the education of all future early adopters of the exciting, useful (and of course, as always, potentially dangerous) innovations that the crypto-world is bringing to the hospitality industry.

You are invited to join them and learn all the details and technology behind the scenes of this and other exciting projects they are developing and implementing.

The project was developed by:

• Tadej Kržišnik – chef at EDEN restaurant
• Boris Balant – NFT designer
• Jaka Godejša – Web3 Travelers, co-founder & core member

With partners:

• UP FTS sTOUdio Turistica
• FromZero Alliance
• PAKT Incubator from Rajzefiber and Center for creativity

You can find more information about the project on the Web3 Travelers Blog.

In our work, we also use the Business Model Canvas, which we have evolved from the usual BMC to focus more on the challenges faced by our peripheral tourism providers. With the updated Canvas, we have added some elements and questions related to tourism and its specificities. We are constantly evolving our methodology as we learn about the challenges tourism providers face during consultations and project work.

Members of AIRTH and the Tourism 4.0 consortium founded the TourismFromZero initiative shortly after the pandemic came into our lives. It is an initiative inspired by the challenges of the COVID -19 pandemic of 2020 and the problems of over-tourism in recent years. They created a survey aimed at tourism staff, tourism students, academics, locals or anyone who would like to share ideas, thoughts, solutions or challenges created by the pandemic. To date, the initiative has received more than 900 responses, insights and ideas from around the world.

Among the ideas on how to restart tourism, one came from the students of the pilot R&D study program UP FTS sTOUdio Turistica (now FromZero coordinators) with a common focus on local experiences offered “from scratch”. These students, with the help of their TourismFromZero mentors, created the LocalsFromZero marketplace.

The LocalsFromZero Marketplace focuses on supporting small and unique providers who preserve traditions, crafts, festivals and ceremonies in their local communities. We are looking for experience providers who do not yet have a standardized, “mass market” tourism offering. We are looking for locals, their clubs, charities, associations and anyone else who is not normally found in standardized travel packages. To achieve this, we have developed a new model with the so-called Scouts.

LocalsFromZero scouts are the link between experience providers and tourists and are experts in tourism, their local environment and (digital) marketing. LFZ Scouts help local experience providers to become more visible on the regional tourism map. They take care of reservations, administration and everything else that the local provider is not (yet) qualified for or lacks.

The LocalsFromZero marketplace has now evolved and partnered with Fairbnb.coop, with whom we are working towards community-driven tourism.

After the merger of our startup LocalsFromZero with Fairbnb, our team has also become a strategic partner and ambassador for Fairbnb Slovenia. This means we are responsible for building a network of hosts to help our destination build community-driven tourism.

Slovenia is already well on its way to becoming a sustainable country. With Fairbnb we strengthen the social aspect of sustainability even more. Travelers staying with Fairbnb hosts in Slovenia now enable 50% of the platform commission to go to specific social projects that the local community chooses. The new experiential model with local Scouts that has begun in Slovenia will now allow our community to grow further and allow our Scouts and providers to help their community even more.