Archive formerly decode.travel Decode Travel was a hackathon series by Chain4Travel (2024–2025).
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🎉 FINISHED

The hackathon for travel tech innovation

//DATE: May 6-9, 2025
//LOCATION: Crete, Greece

That’s a wrap! Thank you to everyone who joined us in Heraklion, Crete. Here’s how it went.

After the events in Antalya, Chain4Travel teamed up with Avra Tours and Cyberlogic for another Web3 hackathon, this time in the heart of Heraklion. In a relaxed setting of Greek hospitality and sea views, three teams of developers and travel experts built three working prototypes in just two days. Camino committed to supporting the teams beyond the hackathon and to feeding some of their ideas into the development of its own platform.

//In numbers
builders
25+
builders
teams
3
teams
working prototypes in two days
3
working prototypes in two days
//Winners

The prize: $CAM & honor.

Innovation & Blockchain · Market Viability

Hermes

Challenge: Messenger

Event-based travel at the push of a button. Travelers sign up for event categories; destination management companies worldwide feed the events into a decentralized database, and travelers automatically get matching hotels and offers near the venue. The app used Camino Network’s blockchain entirely through Camino Messenger, without touching the blockchain directly.

Technical Excellence

BlockBuster

Challenge: Micropayments

Smarter micropayments for travel bookings: a digital escrow that settles exactly what happens to payouts and commissions when a supplier or an intermediary cancels, avoiding the chain reactions of manual processes when several suppliers share one booking. The working demo ran on the Camino blockchain: travelers book with a digital wallet and receive an NFT as booking confirmation.

Teams

CAMpensation

Faster refunds for airlines: one shared channel between travel distribution and suppliers, where smart contracts keep a single, verifiable record of every refund claim and its status. This prevents duplicate claims, allows payouts in digital currencies and could bring in digital identities and legal intermediaries to identify travelers.

//Challenges

Tackle real pain points from travel companies.

Avra logo sponsored by Avra
Travel Technology
Universal logo sponsored by Universal
Travel Innovation
Micropayments

Small bookings involve many hands: tour operators, local agencies, transfer and activity providers all keep their own copy of the booking, and splitting a small payment between them often ends in disputes and manual reconciliation. The challenge was to build a smart contract on Camino Network that shares each payment between all parties automatically and transparently.

Taken up by Block Busters

Messenger

Camino Messenger lets travel businesses talk to each other and trade directly, and this challenge asked teams to build something new on top of it.

Taken up by Hermes

Airline refunds

Bring your own challenge

Refund requests between travel sellers and airlines pass through many channels and can easily be claimed twice.

Taken up by CAMpensation

Also proposed

  • Personalization

    Privacy-preserving identity for travellers with EUDI wallets and zero-knowledge proofs, for example for car rental.

  • Networking

    The Camino Partner Showroom as a B2B networking platform for travel companies.

  • Lottery

    Win YOUR DREAM Trip: a verifiable raffle with NFTs.

//Jury

The jury was joined by Michele Ruberl and Sam Jaarsma of the Chain4Travel team.

//Quotes
“This hackathon shows once again how practical solutions that decisively advance the digitalization of the travel industry can emerge in a very short time. The ideas and implementations from Greece have enormous potential to make existing processes simpler, more secure and more sustainable, and we look forward to developing some of these approaches further together with our partners.”
Pablo Castillo
CEO of Chain4Travel and co-initiator of Camino Network
Translated from the German press release
//Agenda

Decode Travel Greece in 4 days

// Day 01
May 6
Kick-off
  • 14:00Kick-off in Crete, challenge presentations, team get-together
  • 19:00Welcome Dinner
// Day 02
May 7
Hacking
  • 09:00Breakfast
  • 09:00Hackathon
// Day 03
May 8
Hacking
  • 09:00Breakfast
  • 09:00Hackathon
  • 19:00Pitch Deadline
// Day 04
May 9
Pitches
  • 09:00Breakfast
  • 10:00Pitch kick-off
  • 14:00Award ceremony
//Press & links
//Partners & Sponsors

Thank you to our partners & sponsors

//Organizers
  • Chain4Travel logo
  • Avra Tours logo
  • Cyberlogic logo
//Sponsors
  • A3M Global Monitoring logo
  • SH Financials logo
  • Avra logo
  • Cyberlogic logo
  • Juice logo