the cool cousin
For many of us, family gatherings can be quite the spectacle. So often we find ourselves in a room with members of our extended family fighting the urge to stare into our phone screen for some semblance of entertainment. Then, after hours of spending time with your extended family doing things you'd maybe rather not, you finally get the freedom to do what you want. At this point, many of us have a liaison to fun new experiences that make these trips worth while, and that liaison typically comes in the form of the cool cousin. The cousin that's age appropriate and has similar interests and knows the area well and can find fun events for you to enjoy together, or even that simply recommends things for you to do with your spouse or immediate family. Everyone loves the cool cousin that can make a generic family visit a blast, if only you could have a cool cousin in every city!
Source: Pixabay
The Cool Cousin
Lucky for you, you do have a cool cousin in many cities already! Well, not a cool cousin, a Cool Cousin. Cool Cousin is a fully functional phone app that helps users find places and events in cities around the world. Cool Cousin has 7 different types of participants that will make sure you can plan a memorable vacation. Here's how it works!
Cousins
People within a supported city will create a profile that will attract users who are looking for ideas/advice when visiting their city. They can give some information as to why they feel they would be the best guide to the city and what areas they have the most knowledge of. They make themselves available to answer questions from app users.
Pro-Cousins
For those who are extremely adept at providing excellent service to users on the platform, there is room to become a pro-cousin who will provide more expansive services much like a travel agent.
Users
The users are those who would download the application and seek out advice/events to improve a trip to a city they're not familiar with. They will have some free information available but will also be able to engage with Cousins in exchange for CUZ tokens for inside information and assistance with trip planning.
Contributors
Users who then provide value back into the platform after seeking information from Cousins can become Contributors. They can do this by offering feedback on the locations they visited and by taking pictures and correcting information regarding locations they visited. They can also promote Cool Cousin on their social media.
Editors
When Contributors offer feedback and corrections they don't get published immediately. Cool Cousin does not want just anybody posting whatever they want about locations, as it would encourage some level of corruption. This is why they have Editors to validate the information provided by Contributors to ensure the information is truthful and helpful. Editors are made up of those who have been proven Contributors.
Board of Representatives
In the case that there is a dispute between Contributors and Editors, there will be a designated Board of Representatives to handle the dispute. This represents the top of the latter where a final decision is made. The Board of Representatives will get a cut of the CUZ tokens if an issue is escalated to that level, which incentivizes Contributors and Editors to resolve their own disputes if possible.
Business Owners
The entire ecosystem is primarily centered around people on the ground that can offer value to each other, that being said, there will be room for businesses to use Cool Cousin in the future. There will be the capacity for sponsored content to be listed on the app. The users will still be able to see if content was produced by a Cousin or a Business as to not trick Users.
All of this gets wrapped up into a single easy to use platform. Cool Cousin is rapidly expanding and covers over 65 cities currently. It has an iOS platform available now and an android app scheduled for Q4 of 2018. To promote early market penetration, they will have fiat on-ramps available for those who want to use native fiat currencies instead of CUZ tokens to make purchases. Those fiat purchases will be converted into CUZ tokens for the recipient to promote growth of the CUZ token. The end result is an easy to use solution for all your travel needs at your fingertips.
Source: Cool Cousin Whitepaper
Why Cool Cousin?
It's true that there are many sites online that any user can reference to plan a trip. As a matter of fact, the Cool Cousin whitepaper notes that most people visit 28 websites on 76 online sessions over 53 days to plan a vacation. Wouldn't it be great if those people could visit one app on a handful of sessions over a much shorter period of time and walk away with recommendations that may or may not be on any of those 28 websites given by people that actually live in that city? The whitepaper also cites a Nielsen study stating that when planning a vacation, 82% of respondents prefer recommendations from someone they know and 34% of millennials were using travel agents in 2014 (compared to 19% in 2011) indicating that they would prefer this sort of experience over searching 28 websites. We also see that millennials vacation more often than previous generations. There's certainly no shortage of supply in this market, tourism was a $2.3 trillion industry (source) in 2016! Check out the below figures in regards to millennials and travel!
Source: Cool Cousin Whitepaper
So, if you want to spend hours upon hours researching your next vacation only to hope you made the best plans, feel free to do so. If you want the best advice from people that live in your vacation destination, the ones that can tell you where the best BBQ joint is and will warn you that you cannot attend event 1 at 3 PM and then make it to event 2 at 6 PM unless you take the train due to traffic, then check out Cool Cousin!
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