AVA (Travala) is one of only a handful of alt coins I've bought in the last year, and so far it's proving to be a good investment....
It was @trumpman who alerted to me this opportunity a few months ago, who in turn was put onto it by @empoderat, and so thanks to these guys for doing the initial scouting, research and recommending!
This is one of the few coins I've come across with a genuine real-world use case that isn't just purely financial but based in a real world service: travel and experiences.
It is currently sitting at market rank #155 on CoinMarketCap with a max supply of 64 million tokens and with a burn policy to reduce that down to 40 million. It's currently valued at $1.62 - annoyingly down from over $1.70 when I first started writing this on Thursday, but that's crypto!
What is AVA (Travala.com)?
It's an evolving travel and experience booking website, which also happens to be Crypto friendly.
I say 'also happens to be' crypto friendly because if you visit Travala.com you probably wouldn't even notice the crypto friendly aspect unless you were looking out for it:
The main public facing front end functions pretty much like Expedia - you can search for flights, hotels, and experiences and after a brief search period you are returned your results in price rank order.
NB - You get returned cheaper prices on Travala.com than Expedia
The reason I finally caved in to @trumpman's shilling a of AVA and finally bought some a couple of months back is that I conducted a search for flights and found cheaper options on Travala.
Here are my search returns on Expedia for flights from Lisbon to London in mid April 2021:
And the top returns from Travala using the same search parameters:
More interestingly the next set of Travala returns which are the same flights as the top returns from Expedia, but Travala is offering them for 15% cheaper...
I imagine that these cheap deals are only IF you buy in crypto and utilise the various discounts you get from staking AVA, but that's part of the clever model of using Crypto on a travel website - it incentivises people to buy AVA!
The AVA token - use cases
There are several use cases for AVA, I'm going to split them into staking and purchase use cases.
If you stake AVA in Travala's SMART programme you get the following benefits:
- A Smart bonus - an annual 24% return on your stake, paid out in AVA, I think it's every month.
- Smart Discounts - a discount of booking through the website, up to 5%
- Smart Loyalty - a reward of up to 5% paid out once you've used whatever it is you've paid for!
The rewards are tiered, according to how many tokens you stake - there are five levels from 500 to a maximum stake of 5000.....
In tier two for example you get the following rewards...
And you get more for higher levels of staking, up to a total discount of 10% (5% + 5%) off travel bookings if you combine the smart discount and loyalty bonus, and then another 24% on top in staking rewards.
On top of this, if you pay in AVA, you get even more of a discount on purchases.
If you look up at the above prices - you'll notice where the 15% saving comes from - it's by adding the three bonuses together, and if you then add on the staking
More use cases for AVA
Just look at all the planned developments....
One thing that really stands out for me from the list above is the 'review rewards' - an obvious idea, to reward users for writing reviews, nice!
Tokenonomics
There are total of 64 million tokens and a buy back scheme and token burn. Every three months Travala buys back a sum AVA proportional to its revenue and burns it, and they'll keep doing so until the total supply is down to 40 000 000.
You can see the burns on their block explorer.
Increasing revenue
Travala seems to be on the up and up - revenues are increasing, they recently partnered with Expedia , the ads programme has hardly started, and this just looks like an awesome project!
Travala - worth more than Hive?
Well it's hard to make a comparison between the two coins - they have very different functionalities, and because Hive is much broader in scope it has the potential to reach more people.
However, while AVA is focussed purely on travel and experiences, that's still a huge market, and that combined with the low circulating supply means the value of token is probably just going to keep on increasing!
And possibly because AVA is so focused, that is its strength - it's a VERY clear selling point - buy and stake AVA and then use it to pay for flights and holidays and you will save money.
I mean, who doesn't want to save 15% on their holiday>?
A Potential limit to the price?
I guess what will limit the value of AVA is the value of savings you can get through staking, which depends on how many flights and holidays you take. If you're very forward thinking then $10 000 on 5000 AVA seems reasonable IF that's going to save you 15% on $10 000 worth of holidays every year.
Then you've made your money back in savings after 6 years, plus a 24% return on what you've staked.
And that calculation would put AVA at $2, which seems reasonable, with room for it to go up from there just based on its primary use-case.
And there is plenty of speculative potential here too of course!
If you want to read more about AVA - here's trending for the tag on LEO!