Ecosystem Updates
Introducing Groups: A Home for the People You Travel With
Your own spaces on Tratok for a family, a set of friends, a diving club or a whole travel community. Plan the trip together, keep the photographs, split the bill, and talk to each other in sixteen languages.
So what is a group?
A group is a space on Tratok that belongs to a particular set of people. Your family. The six friends you always end up travelling with. A diving club with members in four countries. A cycling community that meets up twice a year.
You create one, you decide who can come in, and from then on everything to do with that circle lives in one place instead of scattered across a chat, an email thread, three screenshots and somebody’s notes app.
Inside a group you get a discussion board, trips you build together, a shared map, a gallery for the photographs, and a simple way to split what things cost. Groups sits with Feed, Chat and Wallet in the main Tratok menu.
Think of it as the difference between talking about a trip and actually having one written down somewhere everybody can find.
What you can do in one
The kinds of groups people are making
The easiest way to explain Groups is to show you four of them. Every one of these leans on a different part of it.
The pattern is the same every time. A group of people, a plan that has to survive contact with real life, and somewhere for all of it to live.
The bit everybody dreads, handled
Somebody always pays for the villa, the boat or the van. And then that person spends the next fortnight being apologetic about it, opening with the worst sentence in hospitality: “so, about the bill.”
In a group they simply record what they paid, tick who was in on it, and split it evenly or set a different amount for each person. Everybody is told once, with their own share.
If somebody still has not paid the next day, one nudge can go out. That is the limit: one per person, per twenty four hours, and only from the person actually owed. Nobody gets hounded, and nobody has to do the hounding.
The arithmetic is exact to a hundredth of a TRAT and is proven to add up before anything is written down, so a three way split of an awkward number cannot lose a fraction or invent one.
To be clear about what this is: it is a request for payment between members. One person records it, everyone else is asked, and each person pays with their own press on the ecosystem.
TRATernity: exclusive members-only club
Then there are TRATernities, and these are a different proposition entirely.
A TRATernity is a members’ club inside Tratok. International by nature, built around people who travel seriously and who hold a meaningful stake in the ecosystem. It can never be public, and you cannot simply ask one person to join and hope.
Nobody lets you into a TRATernity. The room votes you in.
There is no owner at the door deciding. Every active member votes on each candidate, and you are admitted once the yes votes reach half the room. You watch the tally move while it happens, members can change their minds, and the moment the math becomes certain it is settled, so nobody is left waiting a week because three members are on a flight.
To found one you hold at least 100,000 TRAT, and you may found exactly one. The rule then keeps applying to you: drop below that balance and a thirty day clock starts, recover and it clears, stay below and the club disbands. The person who founded it lives by the same standard as everyone they admitted.
Why a room like that is worth being in
A TRATernity is a concentration of exactly the people the travel industry wants to reach. Members who travel often, who decide together, and who already transact in TRAT.
Which is precisely why service providers can and will approach these clubs directly, with special offers and invitations meant for their members rather than for the general public. A resort with a quiet season to fill, a tour operator with something unusual to sell, a restaurant that would like the right forty people to know it exists.
That is the real prize. Not a badge, but access: to a circle of like minded travellers, and to the offers that come looking for a circle like that.
Getting in, and keeping people out
Ordinary groups come in three kinds, and you choose when you create one.
Invitations arrive as a message from your friend in TRATchat, with a button in it, rather than a long code you are meant to trust. Tratokians can only invite people they are actually friends with.
Starting one takes 15 seconds
Just open Groups from the main menu on the ecosystem, give it a name, add a picture if you have one, write a line about what it is for, and choose how people get in.
Then invite the people you already travel with, and put the next trip in it.
One last thing worth knowing: every group can tell you fourteen different things, from a new discussion to a bill split with you. They land in your notification list, and on your phone as well if you have turned push on, each one written in the reader’s own language.
Everyone plans trips with other people. Almost nobody has anywhere sensible to do it. Now you do.
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