BlockTour: A blockchain-based smart tourism platform

The traditional tourism industry is in urgent need of digital technologies for cost reduction and efficiency enhancement. Blockchain, as an emerging technology, is promising to reform the tourism industry because it provides a trustworthy platform to link the tourism company and tourists. However, the existing blockchainbased smart tourism solutions are either conceptual or limited in solving the fundamental tourism challenges. In this paper, we propose BlockTour, a blockchain-based smart tourism platform with dedicated solution to address the challenges and real-world prototype deployment. In particular, we design the overall system architecture of BlockTour to link the tourists and attractions in a trustworthy way. Moreover, an efficient consensus mechanism is designed with incentives for the tourists to explore more attractions. Finally, we implement BlockTour and conduct extensive experiments for performance evaluation. The experimental results indicate that BlockTour is a practical and high-performance smart tourism platform.