Hahn Air has become the first airline to issue tickets enabled by blockchain technology.

Working with Winding Tree, the German airline flew the world’s first blockchain passengers from Dusseldorf to Luxembourg. These were Frederick Nowotny, head of sales engineering at Hahn Air; Maksim Izmaylov, founder of Winding Tree; and Davide Montali, CIO of Winding Tree.

The open-source travel distribution platform enables Hahn Air to list inventory, manage reservation requests, and receive payments in cash, credit card, or cryptocurrency (LIF token or Ether).

Frederick Nowotny said: “We at Hahn Air are constantly exploring new technologies and we are proud to now demonstrate our technical capability to issue blockchain-powered Hahn Air tickets.

“Our goal is to investigate and monitor the opportunities this technology holds for travel distribution, even if widespread acceptance is still a vision of the future.”

Winding Tree is a decentralised, open-source travel distribution platform. As well as working with Hahn Air it has partnerships with a number of airlines and hotels including Air Canada, 0'>Air France-KLM, 0'>Lufthansa, Nordic Choice Hotels and the citizenM Hotel chain.

Maksim Izmaylov said: “While blockchain technology is currently almost exclusively associated with the cryptocurrency bitcoin it bears great potential for all industries and endless applications. It will have an enormous impact on all areas of economy and commerce over the next decades.”

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