Tourism is not like other industries

Most industries deal with domestic customers most of the time. A plumber serves a neighbourhood. A law firm serves a city. A supermarket chain serves a country. Their payment infrastructure is built for one currency, one banking system, one regulatory environment — and that simplicity makes their payment problems relatively easy to solve.

Tourism is different. By definition, it draws money from everywhere. The visitor sitting across the table from a Gold Coast resort manager right now might have flown in from Japan, the United Kingdom, France, or New Zealand. Their money started life in yen, pounds, euros, or kiwi dollars. Between that money and the Queensland business receiving it, there is a long and expensive chain of intermediaries — banks, payment processors, currency conversion desks, card networks — each one taking a slice, each one adding delay, each one introducing a point where the transaction can slow down, fail, or cost more than anyone expected.

The travel industry is one of the most dynamic industries in the world, dealing with international transactions daily and being exposed to currency fluctuations. That is not a passing observation. It is a structural reality. And it means that when we talk about payment infrastructure for the tourism sector, we are not talking about a convenience upgrade — we are talking about a fundamental redesign of how money moves across borders in one of the world’s most economically significant industries.

We believe onchain payments are the most important payment development for the tourism sector in a generation. Here is our thinking.

The scale of what’s at stake in Queensland

Before getting into the mechanics, it helps to understand what we are actually talking about when we say Queensland’s tourism industry depends on international money.

Visitor spending climbed to $43.5 billion in the year ending September 2025, supported by new international records. That is not a small industry. International travellers spent a record $7 billion in the year ending September 2025 — an increase of 13.3%. Record-breaking spending was courtesy of visitors from New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, Taiwan, France, and Italy.

Brisbane and the Gold Coast were the two leading destinations for international visitors in Queensland. International visitor spending also broke records in four iconic Queensland regions, including Tropical North Queensland, Sunshine Coast, Queensland Country, and the Southern Great Barrier Reef, while a record $3.3 billion was spent in Brisbane.

Every one of those billions of dollars entered Queensland from overseas. Every transaction had to cross at least one currency border. Every booking made by an international visitor from their home country involved some form of currency conversion, some form of cross-border payment fee, and some degree of financial friction. The tourism industry directly and indirectly employs 260,000 Queenslanders — or 1 in 15 of all people employed in Queensland. That is the employment base that sits on top of this payment infrastructure. It is worth paying close attention to how that infrastructure actually works — and where it leaks.

The real cost of crossing a currency border

When an international tourist books a Queensland resort, pays for a sailing charter out of Airlie Beach, or splits their bill at a Surfers Paradise restaurant, something complicated happens behind the scenes that neither the tourist nor the business owner fully sees.

Cross-border fees can include transaction, currency conversion, and bank fees, which vary by financial institution and payment system. Each step of this process is a potential point of friction, not to mention the fees that chip away at already thin profit margins.

Tourism, as an industry, already operates on thin margins. The revenue per booking can look large in absolute terms, but once you strip out accommodation costs, staffing, activities, food and beverage, and the standard overhead of running a hospitality business in a competitive destination, what remains is a margin that cannot easily absorb a tax of several percent on every international transaction. In a high-volume, low-margin industry like travel, fees really matter.

Foreign exchange (FX) fees typically run between 1% and 3% of the transaction value. Across hundreds of bookings, these fees very quickly eat into margins.

That is before we account for the psychological dimension. Customers hesitate to complete bookings when asked to pay in a foreign currency. It creates uncertainty and friction, and this may prompt them to take their business elsewhere. This is a real and measurable phenomenon in the tourism booking process. An international traveller planning a Queensland holiday from Tokyo or London is doing their calculations in their home currency. When they encounter a checkout process that requires them to switch mental models, absorb a currency conversion rate they cannot control, and trust that the final amount charged to their card will be close to what they agreed to pay — some of them abandon the booking altogether.

The problem does not disappear once the tourist arrives in Queensland, either. Cash withdrawals from ATMs abroad carry fees. Card transactions at point-of-sale carry network fees. With more and more travel and tourist businesses having to accept payments from foreign tourists via card or online, businesses have become more sensitive to currency exchange. And the sensitivity only increases as international visitor numbers grow. That sensitivity is not an abstract financial concern. It is a lived operational reality for every tourism business in this state.

Why the exchange rate problem is structural, not accidental

There is a temptation to treat foreign exchange friction as a technical problem that better software or smarter banking products can solve within the existing system. We think this misdiagnoses the problem. The friction is not a bug in the current architecture. It is a feature of an architecture that was designed before the internet, updated incrementally, and never rebuilt from first principles.

Exchange rates play a significant role in influencing international tourism. The impact of exchange rates on tourism is multifaceted and can affect both the demand and supply sides of the industry.

Consider what it means in practice for a Queensland tourism operator to have significant exposure to foreign currencies. When selling customers tours or flights, destination management companies and travel agencies often set their price well ahead of time, sometimes up to 18 months ahead. This means that if currencies fluctuate between a customer’s advance payment and the moment foreign suppliers need to be paid, the travel company may find itself having to cover the difference.

This is not a hypothetical scenario. A tour operator selling Great Barrier Reef experiences to a Japanese audience, pricing in Australian dollars but marketing to customers who think in yen, is making a bet every time they publish a price. If the exchange rate moves against them between the point of booking and the point of travel, their revenue has effectively shrunk. They didn’t make a bad business decision. They just got caught in the mechanics of a payment system that was never built for the kind of global, multi-currency commerce that modern tourism represents.

There are many fundamental and technical factors that can cause exchange rates to fluctuate, including changes in interest rates, the health of a country’s economy, supply and demand of currencies, and inflation. None of these factors are within the control of a Gold Coast accommodation provider or a Daintree eco-tour operator. They are structural features of a globally interconnected financial system — and tourism, perhaps more than any other industry, is fully exposed to every one of them.

What onchain payments actually change

Let us be precise about what we mean by onchain payments, because this is an area where vague generalisations do a lot of damage. Onchain payments are transactions that settle directly on a blockchain network, without passing through the traditional banking intermediary chain. The payer sends value. The receiver receives it. The transaction is recorded permanently and immutably on a distributed ledger. There is no correspondent banking network, no SWIFT message, no currency conversion desk sitting in the middle.

Blockchain technology enables global ledger transactions that are fast, secure, and cost-efficient. This makes it an ideal option for payment processing in the tourism industry, where payments are often made across borders and at high volumes.

Cryptocurrency enables travelers to make payments across borders without worrying about exchange rates or banking restrictions. Digital wallets provide a seamless way to transact globally. Blockchain technology ensures secure and transparent payments, minimising delays and fees — and this is particularly beneficial for international travelers who often face high costs with traditional payment methods.

For a Queensland tourism business, this changes several things at once.

First, it changes the cost structure of international transactions. When a payment moves onchain, the fee is not a percentage of the transaction determined by a bank’s foreign exchange desk. It is a network fee, typically a small fixed amount, determined by the computational cost of recording the transaction — not by the size of the payment or the currencies involved. A large booking and a small booking pay essentially the same fee. A payment from Japan and a payment from France pay essentially the same fee. The asymmetry that currently penalises international tourism transactions is removed.

Second, it changes settlement speed. Traditional cross-border payments can take days to clear, passing through multiple correspondent banks, each of which has its own processing schedule and cut-off times. Onchain transactions settle in minutes, or in some cases seconds. For a tourism operator managing cash flow against a busy season, the difference between receiving payment in real time and receiving it three business days later is not trivial. The compounding effect across hundreds of bookings through a peak period is substantial.

Third, it changes who can participate. Crypto payments are especially appealing to users in underbanked regions, where access to traditional banking services is limited. This inclusivity is driving adoption among diverse demographics. Queensland’s tourism market includes visitors from a wide range of countries and financial backgrounds. Some of those visitors face specific barriers with traditional payment systems — not because they lack money, but because their home country’s banking infrastructure does not integrate cleanly with Australian financial systems. Onchain payments remove this barrier. If you have a wallet and a connection, you can transact.

The payment address problem, and why it matters more than people realise

There is a dimension of this that goes beyond the mechanics of onchain transactions themselves, and it is the one we care most about at Queensland Foundation. Even if onchain payments are faster, cheaper, and more inclusive than traditional banking — which we believe they are — they still require a destination address. And the addresses on most blockchain networks are not usable by ordinary people.

A traditional blockchain wallet address looks something like this: a long string of hexadecimal characters with no meaningful structure and no human readability. It cannot be remembered. It cannot be spoken out loud at a point of sale. It cannot be printed on a business card in a way that a customer can confidently transcribe. It cannot be shared in conversation without the risk of a transcription error that sends money to the wrong place, permanently and irreversibly.

This is the unsolved problem at the heart of onchain payment adoption for any business that deals with the public. The technology that handles the transaction is better than what came before. But the address infrastructure — the thing that tells the payer where to send the money — is still in a primitive state. It requires ordinary people to behave like machines: copying and pasting long strings of characters, triple-checking every digit, trusting that a QR code is legitimate.

An onchain address that is human-readable changes everything about this problem.

On-chain domain names allow crypto users to type in a name — like bob.eth — instead of complex wallet addresses when conducting cryptocurrency transactions. That is the basic mechanism. But the implications run much further than that. A human-readable onchain address is not just a convenience for the payer. It is a stable, permanent identity for the receiver. It is something a business can put on a menu, a booking confirmation, a beach sign, a hotel check-in desk. It is something a tourist can remember from a conversation with a surf instructor. It is something that makes the gap between “I want to pay onchain” and “I have successfully paid” narrow enough that ordinary people will actually cross it.

Once purchased, you own your Web3 domain for life, and you can use it as an all-in-one payment address for crypto transactions. That “for life” matters enormously in a tourism context. A tourism business invests in its identity over years and decades. The Surfers Paradise restaurant that has been operating for fifteen years has built brand equity around its name, its location, its reputation. It does not want a payment address that expires annually, or that can be taken back by a registrar, or that requires it to rebuild its payment identity every time a contract lapses. Unlike traditional domains, which users rent annually through centralized registrars, blockchain domains function as permanent, on-chain assets, fully eliminating yearly renewal costs. Once purchased, they belong to the owner indefinitely — no recurring fees, no risk of expiration, and no intermediary controlling access.

What a Queensland Foundation address means for a Queensland tourism business

When we decided to secure permanent onchain TLDs for Queensland — .queensland, .qld, .brisbane, .surfersparadise, .gold-coast, and .brisbane2032 — the tourism sector was one of the first communities we had in mind. The reasoning was not abstract. It came from asking a simple question: which businesses in Queensland most need a permanent, place-identified, onchain payment address?

A surf school in Surfers Paradise serves people from every country on earth. Its customers arrive having converted currency, accepted whatever exchange rate their card issuer applied, and absorbed whatever fees came with that. When they want to pay — for lessons, for photos, for a tip to the instructor who found their confidence in the waves — they are operating in an unfamiliar payment environment. They may not have Australian cash. Their card may not work at a mobile terminal in a beach environment. But they almost certainly have a smartphone and a digital wallet.

A permanent, human-readable address on the .surfersparadise or .gold-coast extension does something specific for that surf school. It gives the business an onchain identity that is legible as a place, as a destination, as something rooted in Queensland geography. The customer from Japan or France or Brazil sees an address that tells them not just who they are paying, but where they are. The address carries context. It signals legitimacy. It is not just a technical destination — it is a brand element.

The same logic applies up and down the tourism supply chain. A Cairns dive operator using a .queensland address does not need to explain what that address means. Its geographic identity is embedded in the extension itself. A Brisbane hotel using a .brisbane2032 address is not just accepting payment — it is situating itself within one of the most significant international events Queensland will ever host. With Brisbane declared the host of the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games, Queensland is expected to benefit from a two-decade pipeline of opportunity, including significant economic and community benefits across the state, as well as a boost to international tourism spend. The address is a statement of participation in that moment.

And because these addresses are onchain — permanent, immutable, not subject to renewal or expiry — the tourism business that establishes itself with a Queensland Foundation address is building something that lasts. Because the registry exists on a blockchain, it is immutable and transparent. No central authority can alter the records without the owner’s private key signature. The address they register today will be the same address on their menu, their booking page, and their check-in desk in five years, in ten years, in twenty. There is no annual renewal conversation. There is no risk of the address being reassigned or expired. The business can invest in promoting its payment identity with confidence that the investment will hold.

The international tourist’s perspective

We have spent most of this discussion looking at the problem from the supply side — the Queensland businesses receiving payment. But the argument is equally compelling, arguably more so, from the demand side — the international tourist trying to pay.

Think about what an international tourist actually goes through to spend money in Queensland. Before they arrive, they have probably made one or more large cross-border payments — accommodation deposits, package bookings, tour reservations. Each of these payments moved through the international banking system at a cost. The tourist may not have seen this cost directly, but it was there: in the exchange rate they were offered, in the foreign transaction fees on their card statement, in the processing delays that made them nervous about whether their booking actually went through.

When they arrive, the friction continues. Cash withdrawals abroad carry fees. Card payments at point of sale may carry foreign transaction charges. Some smaller operators — a market stall at a night market, a waterfall kayak guide, a reef fishing charter — may only take cash, which means another trip to an ATM, another fee, another conversion at an unfavourable rate.

The international tourist does not experience these costs as a single, obvious number. They experience them as a general sense that spending money in Queensland costs more than they expected. Some of that is the cost of travel itself. But a non-trivial portion is pure payment friction — money that leaves their wallet and goes to financial intermediaries rather than to Queensland businesses and Queensland communities.

An appreciating destination currency makes travel more expensive for tourists, which can reduce tourism revenue. This is the headline version of the exchange rate problem. But the granular version — the day-to-day, transaction-by-transaction version — is arguably more corrosive, because it affects every single moment of expenditure rather than just the initial decision to travel.

Onchain payments offer the international tourist something genuinely different. A payment from a wallet in Tokyo to a Queensland business’s onchain address settles at the same low network fee regardless of the currencies originally involved. There is no foreign transaction fee. There is no correspondent bank taking a spread. There is no processing delay. The tourist knows exactly what they paid. The Queensland business knows exactly what they received. The transaction is complete, transparent, and recorded.

Why place-based addresses matter in a tourism context

There is something particular about the intersection of place and payment that we think the tourism industry has not fully reckoned with yet.

Traditional payment addresses — bank account numbers, merchant IDs, card terminals — are placeless. They carry no geographic signal. They tell you nothing about who you are paying or where your money is going. This is a minor inconvenience in domestic commerce, where the cultural and legal context is shared. In international tourism, where the visitor is operating in an unfamiliar environment and making rapid judgements about trust and legitimacy, a placeless payment address is a real friction point.

A .brisbane address tells you something. A .surfersparadise address tells you something more specific. When an international visitor to Queensland encounters a payment request that ends in .gold-coast, there is an immediate legibility to that address. It is not just a string of characters. It is a statement of location, of community, of belonging to a place. That matters in a transaction between a global visitor and a local business. It bridges the trust gap that location provides in face-to-face commerce but that traditionally disappears in digital payment flows.

This is what we mean when we say that the Queensland Foundation TLDs are not just payment infrastructure. They are place infrastructure. They give the tourism industry a way to express its geographic identity in the payment layer — which is precisely the layer that international visitors interact with most directly when they are in Queensland.

Queensland’s appeal to international tourists is not only measured by the number of visitors but also by the significant economic contribution each visitor makes. The state’s tourism strategy has focused on attracting high-value visitors, including those seeking memorable holiday experiences. High-value visitors make high-value payments. High-value payments deserve payment infrastructure that is commensurate with the experience the visitor is having. Asking a visitor who has just spent a week at a luxury Whitsundays resort to finalize a large payment through a process that involves foreign transaction fees, opaque exchange rates, and three-day settlement times is a mismatch. The experience promised a premium product. The payment process delivered a 1990s banking workflow.

Onchain payments — anchored to a permanent, human-readable, place-identified address — are the infrastructure that matches the aspiration.

The compounding effect across the supply chain

Tourism is not a single business. It is an ecosystem. A visitor to Queensland does not just pay one operator. They pay a hotel, a restaurant, a tour company, a transport provider, a retail shop, an attraction. They may pay ten or fifteen businesses over the course of a single trip. Each of those payments, under the current system, carries its own friction.

Tour operators, hotel chains, and transport providers may all be based in different countries and therefore require payments in multiple currencies, heightening exposure to fluctuations in exchange rates.

If even a fraction of those transactions move onchain — anchored to human-readable Queensland addresses — the aggregate saving across the tourism ecosystem is material. The friction that currently bleeds out of the system at every transaction point gets returned to the businesses, the workers, and ultimately the communities that depend on tourism for their economic wellbeing.

The tourism sector is either directly or indirectly related to other sectors like transportation, accommodation, or retailing through the trickledown effect. This is the multiplier that makes tourism payment infrastructure so consequential. Every improvement in the payment layer compounds through the supply chain. Every dollar saved on unnecessary fees is a dollar available to be reinvested in the experience, the facility, the staffing — in everything that makes Queensland a world-class destination.

Smart contracts and the future of tourism transactions

There is a further dimension here that deserves attention, even if it sits slightly further out on the horizon. Onchain payments are not simply a better way to move money. They are a foundation layer on which more sophisticated financial logic can be built.

Smart contracts are self-executing contracts with terms and conditions written in code on the blockchain. In tourism, they automate processes such as payment releases when conditions are met — for example, a traveler checks in — reducing the need for manual intervention and minimising errors.

Consider what this means for the tourism business model. A deposit for a sailing charter could be held in a smart contract that automatically releases to the operator when the charter departs, and automatically refunds the guest if weather conditions trigger a cancellation clause. A hotel booking could involve a smart contract that holds payment in escrow until check-in, giving both parties certainty without either having to trust the other in advance. A group tour payment could be split automatically between multiple service providers — transport, guide, accommodation, activities — according to pre-agreed terms, without any manual reconciliation.

None of this is science fiction. The infrastructure for it exists. What has been missing is the address layer — the human-readable, place-identified, permanent onchain addresses that give tourism businesses a stable identity in the onchain payment system. That is the missing piece we are working to supply. Once a Queensland tourism business has a permanent .queensland or .brisbane address, they are not just accepting onchain payments today. They are positioned to participate in the full range of onchain financial infrastructure as it matures.

Blockchain can also enable the use of smart contracts for travel payments to ensure secure and automated transactions. This is where the trajectory leads. The tourism industry that positions itself now — with permanent onchain addresses, with staff who understand how these transactions work, with systems that can receive and process onchain payments — will have a structural advantage over competitors who treat this as a future problem.

The Brisbane 2032 dimension

We would be remiss not to acknowledge the specific relevance of the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games to this discussion. Brisbane 2032 is not just a sporting event. It is a moment of sustained, intense international engagement — a years-long buildup of investment, promotion, visitor activity, and global attention directed at one Australian city and its surrounding region.

The visitors who will come to Brisbane 2032 will arrive from every country on earth. They will carry every major currency. They will attempt to transact in every major payment system. Some of them will come from countries where traditional banking infrastructure does not integrate cleanly with Australian payment systems. Many of them will be digitally sophisticated users who are already comfortable with onchain transactions.

With Brisbane declared the host of the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games, Queensland is expected to benefit from a two-decade pipeline of opportunity, including significant economic and community benefits across the state.

A two-decade pipeline of opportunity. The onchain payment infrastructure being built now — the addresses being registered, the systems being configured, the familiarity being developed — will be mature by 2032. The tourism businesses that are already operating with permanent Queensland Foundation addresses by then will not need to scramble to adopt onchain payment infrastructure under the pressure of an Olympic deadline. They will have been using it for years. Their customers will find it natural. Their operations will have adapted to it. Their competitive position will be established.

The .brisbane2032 TLD exists precisely for this moment. It is a place-signal, an event-signal, and a permanence-signal all at once. A business that registers a .brisbane2032 address is not chasing a trend. It is planting a flag in one of the most significant international events this region will ever host — with an address that will never expire, never need renewing, and will remain as permanently readable as the event itself is historically significant.

What we are building, and why it starts here

We have secured six TLDs for Queensland because we believe that place matters in the onchain economy. The internet has spent thirty years making geography increasingly irrelevant. We think that was a mistake — or at least, an overcorrection. People live in places. Businesses operate in places. Tourism, above all industries, is fundamentally about place. The address infrastructure that underpins the onchain economy should reflect that.

.queensland, .qld, .brisbane, .surfersparadise, .gold-coast, .brisbane2032 — these are not just domain names. They are permanent onchain coordinates for Queensland’s identity in a global economy that is increasingly transacting onchain. When we say permanent, we mean it literally. These addresses do not expire. They do not require annual renewal fees. They are registered once, owned permanently, and live on blockchain infrastructure that no single authority can alter or revoke.

The price of entry — starting at five dollars, paid once — is not a business model designed to extract ongoing value from the people who register. It is a deliberate choice to make this infrastructure as accessible as possible, to ensure that the surf school, the bed-and-breakfast, the reef dive operator, the night-market stall, the small family restaurant, and the boutique tour company have the same access to this permanent address infrastructure as the large hotel chains and international operators. The tourism ecosystem that benefits most from better payment infrastructure is not the top end. It is the long tail of small businesses that make Queensland what it is.

The use of blockchain technologies in tourism can potentially bring down the overall cost structure and benefit tourists and various service providers in the sector. That is the outcome we are building toward. Not a narrowly technological upgrade for blockchain enthusiasts, but a structural improvement in how money moves between international visitors and Queensland businesses — with less friction, less cost, more speed, and more permanence than anything the current system offers.

The window is open now

We want to close with something practical, even if we are not making a direct pitch.

Payment infrastructure shifts slowly until it shifts fast. For most of its history, the internet moved slowly on financial infrastructure — and then suddenly the combination of smartphones, app stores, and contactless payments collapsed a decade of change into a few years. Every business that had not adapted found itself scrambling to catch up during peak trading periods.

Many travel companies see international payments as a ‘set it and forget it’ task, leaving them vulnerable to hidden fees and high abandonment rates. That is the current disposition of much of the tourism industry toward payment infrastructure. It is understandable — tourism operators are busy, margins are thin, and payment plumbing feels like someone else’s problem. But it is a disposition that leaves value on the table and risk in the foundations.

The onchain payment infrastructure that will serve Queensland’s tourism industry for the next generation is being built right now. The address layer — the human-readable, place-identified, permanent TLDs that make onchain payments usable for ordinary businesses and ordinary visitors — exists right now. The cost of participating is genuinely low. The permanence of ownership means there is no ongoing cost. The upside is exposure to a payment system that removes the structural friction that has always penalised international tourism transactions.

We built this because we believe in Queensland, and we believe that the places that shape this state — the beaches, the reefs, the cities, the esplanade restaurants, the mountain rainforests, the surf breaks — deserve payment infrastructure that carries their identity into the onchain economy permanently and without compromise.

The tourism industry should be paying attention. Not because this is speculative or distant. Because the infrastructure is here, the addresses are available, and the window for getting in early — with a permanent, place-identified onchain address that will still be yours in 2032 and beyond — is open right now.