The Hidden Inflation Problem in Hospitality


Hotel pricing is inflation-sensitive by nature. Construction costs rise, labour costs rise, energy costs rise—and nightly rates eventually follow. Yet for travellers, loyalty members, and even corporate buyers, access to future hotel nights is always purchased at tomorrow’s prices, not today’s.
Unlike airlines, commodities, or foreign currencies, there has historically been no mechanism to hedge hotel stay inflation.

A traveller cannot lock in 100 nights today and redeploy them later when prices rise. A hotel guest cannot trade unused nights for future value. A long-term customer cannot benefit from price appreciation—only the hotel owner can.

This asymmetry is the core problem Investay addresses.

What Is Investay Really Tokenising?


At first glance, Investay may be described as a “hotel RWA platform.” But that label is incomplete.
Investay does not tokenise hotel equity, ownership, or control. It does not issue fixed-price points, nor does it peg usage rights to fiat currency. Instead, Investay tokenises something far more fundamental:
Future hotel room nights as a freely tradable, market-priced digital asset.
Each night is represented as an on-chain unit with three defining characteristics:

  1. Non-cash redeemable – nights cannot be converted back into fiat.
  2. Market-priced – nights are bought and sold at prevailing supply-demand prices.
  3. Hotel-specific – no universal base price exists; each property floats independently.
  4. This design choice is intentional—and critical.

Why Fixed Points Systems Always Fail


Traditional hotel loyalty schemes rely on fixed or semi-fixed point systems. While convenient, these systems break down under three conditions:

  1. Inflation accelerates
  2. Hotel prices diverge across markets
  3. Demand shocks occur (events, seasons, geopolitics)
  4. In such systems, points either devalue silently or require constant “devaluations” by the issuer. The customer always loses purchasing power over time.
    Investay rejects this model entirely.

There is no base price, no global peg, and no issuer-controlled valuation. A night at a beachfront resort in Marsa Alam and a city hotel in London are fundamentally different assets—and Investay treats them as such.

The Investay Mechanism: A Free Market for Hotel Nights


The Investay ecosystem introduces a simple but powerful loop:

  1. Capital Entry
    Users enter the system with fiat currency (USD, stablecoins, or regulated on-ramps).
  2. Night Acquisition
    Capital is converted into hotel nights at current market prices.
  3. Time & Inflation Exposure
    As hotel prices rise due to inflation or demand, the market value of those nights increases.
  4. Secondary Trading
    Users may sell nights back to the market at higher prices—not for cash, but for Investay credits.
  5. Reallocation
    Credits can be used to purchase more nights where prices are lower, or at different hotels, or at future dates.
  6. The result is a closed economic loop where value compounds through price differentials, not speculation.
    Hedging Inflation Without Financialisation

  7. Users do not “cash out.”
    They rotate value across time, geography, and pricing cycles.
    This mirrors how sophisticated commodity traders hedge inflation—without exposing end users to leverage, margin calls, or financial complexity.

Why Hotels Accept This Model

  1. From a hotel operator’s perspective, Investay solves problems that traditional distribution channels cannot:
  2. Upfront liquidity without equity dilution
  3. Reduced dependence on OTAs and discounting
  4. Predictable occupancy smoothing across seasons
  5. Price discovery driven by real demand, not algorithms
  6. Most importantly, hotels retain full pricing sovereignty. They are not bound by fixed redemption tables or opaque loyalty liabilities.
    Investay does not replace hotel revenue management—it extends it.

How Investay Differs From Hotel RWA Experiments


Unlike equity-style hotel RWA projects that fractionalise ownership or revenue rights, Investay operates at the usage layer, not the balance-sheet layer.
There are:

  1. No dividend promises
  2. No income projections
  3. No pooled asset risks
  4. Each night is atomic, isolated, and consumable.
    In that sense, Investay is closer to a commodity exchange for hospitality time than to a REIT or securitisation platform.


Where This Model Is Headed


If hotel nights can be freely priced, traded, and redeployed, several second-order effects emerge:
  1. Corporate travel budgets can hedge future costs
  2. Long-stay travellers can arbitrage regions and seasons
  3. Hotels can monetise future capacity without discounting
  4. Inflation exposure shifts from consumers to markets
  5. Over time, hotel nights stop behaving like perishable inventory—and start behaving like time-based assets.

A Structural Shift, Not a Trend

Investay is not a reaction to hype cycles in crypto or RWA. It is a response to a structural mismatch between how hospitality assets are priced and how value is consumed over time.
As inflation persists and global travel normalises, systems that allow people to buy tomorrow’s consumption at today’s prices will no longer be optional—they will be expected.
Whether Investay becomes the dominant model or not, the question it raises is unavoidable:
If everything else can hedge inflation,

why should hotel nights be the exception?