Etihad Airways and Blockchain Winding tree announce partnership

Winding Tree, the open-source travel distribution platform, has partnered with Etihad Airways (Etihad), the national airline of the UAE. Through this partnership, Etihad aims to adopt Winding Tree’s distributed and open-source platform to explore opportunities for seamless distribution of its products and services, and promoting Abu Dhabi as a destination.

The partnership follows Etihad’s participation at Winding Tree’s latest HackTravel hackathon where the Etihad team won the business hackathon challenge with the proposal of a web-based application for Abu Dhabi layover packages, which integrated multiple existing APIs published on Winding Tree, to demonstrate a real-life use case of the technology.

Held in Lisbon, this is the company’s second hackathon. HackTravel was created by Winding Tree for key players in the travel industry, including leaders from hotels, airlines, OTAs, and startups to work collaboratively with software companies and developers to tackle real-world industry pain points, creating proof-of-concept proposals alongside technical hacks and gaining collective expertise. Held in Lisbon, this is the company’s second hackathon.

“We are delighted to be working with Winding Tree, which is doing a great job harnessing the potential of blockchain technology and creating a new distribution marketplace for the travel industry,” said Robin Kamark, Chief Commercial Officer, Etihad Aviation Group. “Etihad is committed to exploring innovative partnerships that drive increased choice for our customers and by leveraging on the Winding Tree platform, we see huge opportunities to expand our product offering and reach for our guests.”

“Our partnership with Etihad Airways is another huge step for Winding Tree, and it’s a great example of how our open-source platform can be incorporated and personalized to solve industry-specific needs,” said Pedro Anderson, COO and Co-Founder of Winding Tree. “After yet another successful HackTravel Hackathon, we are really inspired by the different teams that submitted their projects and ideas, and we look forward to continuing to improve our platform by implementing and supporting each of them.”

During the Hackathon, Winding Tree’s developer team revealed new features related to trust and identity verification, including a LIF token deposit or domain verification. Additional developments include support of other data formats, various trust clues, and new travel data segmentation