In the last blog post, we discussed three (3) examples of how NFTs can be used by Caribbean Companies – the use cases were NFTs in Marketing as behavioral rewards, NFTs in Finance as a means to fundraise and NFTs in Operations as a means to streamline royalty payments. In this latest blog post, as the title suggests, we are going to be discussing a specific example of how Caribbean Countries can use NFTs. In the event you aren’t familiar with the technology or you’re in need of a “refresher”, NFTs are used to easily prove & transfer ownership of items – these items can be natively digital, or they can represent “real world” concepts and objects. In summary, we’ll be discussing NFTs as a tool to support destination marketing by gamifying travel.

NFTs in Destination Marketing
Destination marketing is a type of marketing meant to promote a specific attraction, town, city, region or country with a view to acquire new visitors and encourage repeat trips. Tourist boards (a government agency) are typically the ones to carry out this function on behalf of a country. Given that one of the main goals of a tourist board is to encourage repeat visits, we believe a gamification strategy that leverages the properties of NFTs would be a perfect fit. Gamification is the application of elements of game play (e.g. point scoring, competition with others, rules of play) to other areas of activity to encourage engagement with a product or service. In this case the “product” would be a country and/or local attraction. The idea is to “gamify” travel by rewarding tourists with “badges” every time they visit the country and its local attractions. Those badges can then be used to determine “rank” on a public leaderboard where repeat visits or engagement with several local attractions move you up the ranking. You could then showcase and/or transfer your badges to redeem discounts and benefits from partnered locations in the country. NFTs would be a good fit for this because of its ability to establish ownership, its transferability and the inherited economy/marketplace activity that comes with leveraging the technology. Ownership and transferability empower the visitor and enables the redemption process, and the secondary market adds a unique dynamic where users could sell their badges to other market participants. This creates a unique ecosystem as visitors are incentivized to revisit the country and its attractions because there is a competition element and a financial incentive to do so (discounts/cheaper travel or the opportunity to sell badges on the open market).

So you see, there is a practical example of how NFTs can be used by Caribbean Countries. In the next blog, we will discuss the answer to the question, are NFTs profitable?