BloHosT: Blockchain Enabled Smart Tourism and Hospitality Management

In the era of Industry 4.0, e-tourism uses bulk of digital payments through applications supported by heterogeneous payment gateways. These heterogeneous payment gateways open the doors for the attackers to perform malicious activities such as-hacking of wallet accounts, identity theft, attacks on payment clearance cycles. In e-tourism, financial data is maintained in a centralized cloud server, which can lead to payment failures during peak traffic. The aforementioned issues can be addressed by the usage of a decentralized mechanism such as-blockchain, which enables trust and reputation management among various stakeholders such as-banks, travel agencies, airports, railways, cruises, hotels, restaurants, and local taxis. Motivated by the above discussion, we propose a framework named as BloHosT (Blockchain Enabled Smart Tourism and Hospitality Management), which allows tourists to interact with various stakeholders through a single wallet identifier linked with a cryptocurrency server to initiate payments. BloHosT uses an immutable ledger, where no proofs are required during travel that provides a hassle-free experience to tourists. Also, a Tourism enabled Deep-Learning (TeDL) framework is presented as a part of BloHosT framework, which is trained on experience of previous visited travelers. It provides rating scores to prospective travelers about the recently visited locations by previous travelers. Finally, through case studies, we demonstrate that BloHosT achieves a high Return of Investment (ROI) in tourism sector as compared to traditional frameworks.