Abstract

The shift to all things digital is bringing with it major issues of data protection, security of transactions, monopolization of resources, and a lack of efficient collaboration between the travellers and the service providers. This paper suggests a secure peer-to-peer decentralized system for tourism based on collaborative travel planning, resource sharing, accommodation, and transportation, where trusted resources are exchanged without the involvement of a centralized service. It is proposed to implement a system that combines blockchain technology with distributed ledgers, smart contracts for authentication, decentralized identity management, and encrypted peer communication for secure and transparent tourism interactions. The hardcoded consensus mechanism is replaced with a reputation-based consensus system, which makes the decentralized transactions more trustworthy and reduces the chances of malicious transactions. This framework was tested in a simulated decentralized tourism scenario with 12,500 transactions, 3,000 user nodes, and various scenarios of collaboration among travellers. Experimental analysis showed that the proposed architecture could reduce the intermediary dependency by 81%, and could provide 97.3% transaction integrity, 95.8% authentication accuracy, and 93.6% malicious node detection efficiency. The decentralized resource-sharing mechanism made the overall transparency of the transactions 88% greater and the average processing time of the services 1.9s compared with the traditional centralized tourism platform, which is 4.8s. Further, the adaptive trust evaluation module is able to improve the secure peer selection accuracy by 21% in dynamic network conditions. Blockchain security, decentralized trust computation, and encrypted communication mechanisms help to build a resilient tourism service management and an efficient use of resources. The framework can facilitate the development of future intelligent tourism infrastructures, which have to be coordinated in a secure way, with transparency in transactions and autonomous cooperation between peers in a distributed travel network.