Travel Retail Distribution Issues, Overall
Current messaging protocols, rooted in standards from the 1960s, are outdated and insufficient for modern needs. The various legacy backends where not designed and architected for how the cloud and microservices work today.
Legacy Messaging Protocols and Complexity
Further, the overall pattern of message interaction was designed for a human agent. Many attempts, with various levels of success, have been made to automate the agent side of the conversation. What remains however is a very chatty exchange pattern. The result was roughly a dozen messages to get one booking, long called the “look to book ratio”. As pricing and product options became more sophisticated, this exploded to hundreds, to thousands, to even tens of thousands of messages for one booking. The booking is the only message where anyone makes revenue. That message imbalance is a major source of cost for distribution of a travel product. Another being the cost of labor to support the complexity of the messages driven by pricing and product options.
Impact on Costs and Labor Shortage
The result is high costs with high skill requirements to get any travel product published and available for sale on travel commerce channels. The labor pool with the needed experience is shrinking. Use of AI can mitigate some of this shortfall but has limits. These issues act as a barrier preventing most travel related products getting to a mass use channel. In the United States, mainstream distribution channels boasted a total operating revenue of $120 billion[1] in 2019. This figure, however, represents only a fraction of the entire travel market, as total U.S. travel revenue reached a staggering $1.1 trillion[2] that year. The significant disparity between these figures highlights a substantial amount of unreachable travel content, underscoring the vast potential revenue left untapped. For the travel products that do get published, there is a lack of distribution options translating into a lack of competition, often resulting in higher distribution costs.
Legacy Technology Constraints
The travel retail market constraints are rooted in legacy technology upon which business processes and revenue models were built. The latter makes it extremely difficult for any one company or industry segment (air, car, hotel,,,) to unilaterally change. Opensource based approaches have had success in such scenarios as they pull together a community which acts together to share costs and risk.
[1] Source: Phocuswright White Paper, Air Sales and the Travel Agency Distribution Channel April 2019
[2] Source: U.S. TRAVEL AND TOURISM OVERVIEW (2019), US Travel Association
Airline Specific Issues
Airline companies have a list of issues costing them time, money, and preventing them from improving customer service.
Technical Stakeholders:
- Siloed legacy systems with proprietary APIs and rigid schemas
- Fare calculations extremely complicated and expensive
- High cost of maintaining connectors to multiple distribution platforms
- Vendor lock-in from proprietary platforms or aggregators
- Long integration timelines and testing overhead
- Difficulty modernizing monolithic systems to cloud-native, event-driven architecture
- Stateful nature of PNRs not conducive to modern architectures
Commercial Stakeholders:
- Limited differentiation in channel-distributed offers (price, product, terms)
- High distribution costs due to fragmented tech landscape
- Price flexibility constrained by fare publishing constructs designed in the 60s
- Product flexibility constrained by inflexible interlining requirements.
- Delayed go-to-market for new services, pricing models, or loyalty integrations
- Limited opportunity to bundle air offerings with other travel products
- Poor control over brand representation in third-party environments
Airlines want to enhance the customer experience with AI driven personalization. The ability to reach and interact with the customer however they connect and still offer them the same personalization of service. Impossible? It’s not a technology problem given the capabilities of the cloud, AI, and other key technologies. It’s a cooperation problem that using open-source approaches can solve.
Open Travel
Foundation Proposal
The Open Travel Alliance is extending its current mission by creating the Open Travel foundation, as part of the Linux Foundation, to deliver a combination of standards and open-source code. The concept is simple. Use the approach defined by the Linux Foundation that has successfully addressed many complex industry issues. Instead of numerous organizations in travel retail funding the efforts needed to modernize, do the noncompetitive parts as a community. This will drastically lower the overall cost to deliver for all participating. An added benefit will be commoditization of how the organizations in travel retail interoperate to provide a customer trip level bundled solution. That is, distribution costs are going way down. The foundation is about being able to publish rich, rule-based air offers to any distribution partner—while maintaining control and cutting distribution costs. This opens access to a broader market and new customers at a fraction of today’s integration cost
Unifying Vision
Together, we’re building an open travel infrastructure where air transportation can be combined with expansive customer experience opportunities in a single offer. Not travel for the sake of travel, but travel as a means to achieve a goal such as attending a business meeting, a cultural experience, or both in the same trip. This isn’t a proprietary air platform—it’s an open foundation that levels the playing field, reduces risk, and lets everyone scale.
OpenTravel is Advancing to the Next Level
OpenTravel is entering a new phase in response to the growing travel industry issues of API costs and barriers to interoperability.
A transitional board has convened to investigate and enact expansion and funding plans. There are a range of options is under consideration to enhance data consistency and quality across the industry and ready to use REST/JSON open source APIs. These offerings will have significant impacts on lowering API costs and enabling AI/ML exploitation. Combined with an travel industry wide standard for offer/order structure and behaviors, increased opportunity for net new revenue and customer satisfaction. See a more complete description on our reboot page.
About OpenTravel
The OpenTravel Alliance provides a community where companies in the electronic distribution supply chain work together to create an accepted structure for electronic messages, enabling suppliers and distributors to speak the same interoperability language, trading partner to trading partner.
Mission
Enhance the future of travel by helping industry members transition to digital retail, meeting the needs of today’s app-based consumers who demand personalized solutions. We empower members with message standards, reference architectures, and implementations to support modern APIs and cloud-based solutions, enabling digital retail at scale.
Vision
OpenTravel is a cross-industry technology enabler, driving seamless connectivity within the travel community. We create and collaborate on interoperability assets, providing the foundation for modern, efficient, and connected digital experiences that benefit travelers and industry members alike.
Support OpenTravel:
Fuel the Journey
Join OpenTravel Alliance in revolutionizing travel connectivity! We’re making it easier and more affordable for providers to connect with sellers and customers. By standardizing travel offer publishing, we enable automation, reducing API costs and delivering better, more personalized travel experiences. Your donation fuels innovation, shaping a more connected and accessible travel world.
Not a member yet? Join OpenTravel and help drive the future of travel connectivity!
