Time to end the chaos
When last did you speak to a fellow traveler who was delighted about how their trip arrangements went? Why should we put up with this?
Travel planning is time-consuming and irritating
After 45 years working with travel reservation systems—deeply involved in or familiar with most of the major solutions—I can confidently say: knowing why these systems behave the way they do doesn’t make booking travel any less frustrating.
Even the simplest trips are a headache. Booking air and hotel means juggling flight availability, cost, schedule, company policies, airport proximity, and ground transportation. Then there’s hotel cost, location relative to meetings, and more company rules. Add car rentals, rail options (especially in Europe and Asia), and cruise departures from ports like Miami, Canaveral, or NYC/NJ—and the complexity multiplies.
Frustrations amongst the ultimate customer in our industry are at a boiling point and the time for change has never been more relevant than right now.
Industry Proposed Solutions
So what’s the industry’s answer? Push travelers to supplier websites and apps. Sure, they offer personalization—but they don’t solve the real pain points. I still have to manually navigate all the intersecting variables, or pay someone to do it.
Some channels and distributors are trying to help, but they fall short. What travelers need is simple: “I want to attend a conference” or “I want to go to Disney World”—and the system should handle the rest. There’s buzz around AI agents and LLMs as the magic fix. But even the smartest AI needs clean, actionable data and a deep understanding of travel’s convoluted rules and workflows.
The real solution? Open source.
Other industries have figured this out. Auto manufacturers, for example, now collaborate on non-competitive features—like how cars integrate with smart devices, maps, and even an auto grade Linux. They realized solving the same problems in silos is wasteful and expensive. Travel needs the same approach. An open source effort would reduce complexity, cost, and lower the barriers for publishing travel products—big and small—for AI agents to discover and act on. Imagine tours, restaurant reservations, and niche experiences being just as accessible as flights and hotels.
Making the Change
You can support the changes needed by supporting the creation of the Open Travel Foundation as part of the Linux Foundation.
The time is now as the travel retail market is ripe for disruption and under LF, there is the necessary foundational technology to make it happen. Efforts like Overture Maps, OpenWallet, OpenSearch, DIF, OSSF, and more. . Opensource pulls together a community which act together to share costs and risk.
We’d like to hear from you
Curious to hear more? Visit our website where we will be posting more detail when it becomes available. You may also request to meet and discuss how the foundation will benefit your business on that same page.
