The travel retail industry is evolving to focus on delivering comprehensive experiences rather than just individual services. This shift necessitates enhanced interoperability among travel providers and retailers.
Current protocols, rooted in standards from the 1960s, are outdated and insufficient for modern needs. The industry requires a new approach to handle travel offers as digital retail products while considering the unique characteristics of travel services, such as their transient nature and location specificity.
Addressing these challenges can unlock significant economic opportunities by automating travel arrangements and providing access to previously excluded suppliers. The Open Travel Alliance is working with the Linux Foundation to form an open-source foundation to revolutionize travel retail, fostering a community-driven approach to share costs and risks.
The travel retail market is ripe for disruption, as many of the current 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.
Open-source-based approaches have had success in such scenarios, as they pull together a community that acts together to share costs and risks.
At the Open Travel Alliance, our core purpose drives every initiative we undertake. Our mission and vision statements articulate the essence of our commitment and the future we aspire to create. They serve as the foundation for our strategies and daily operations, guiding our efforts towards achieving meaningful impact.
Mission Statement
Enhance the future of travel by enabling the transition of our travel industry members to digital retail, supporting today’s app-based consumers demanding personalized solutions. Empowering members via message standards, reference architectures, and reference implementations to support their efforts to move to modern APIs and cloud-based solutions that, in turn, support digital retail at scale.
Vision Statement
The Open Travel Alliance is a cross-sector technology enabler for the travel community, providing open-source support for ubiquitous offers capable of omnichannel personalization that will remove barriers to the publishing and consumption of travel products. Any product, offered and sold on any channel, while obeying the supplier’s price and rules.
To fulfill our mission, the Open Travel Alliance will deliver a combination of standards and open-source code.
Standards: Messages and Models
OpenTravel will continue its decades-long work in defining the data and behaviors of travel retail business objects, ensuring seamless integration and communication within the industry. Through collaborative workgroups, the organization meticulously defines the data and structure of crucial business objects like an Offer or Guest/Passenger, conceptualized as nouns, while simultaneously outlining the actions, or verbs, acting upon these nouns. This innovative process is supported by unique tooling that translates these definitions into deployable APIs, significantly reducing the necessity for developers to manually craft message schemas. Much like high-level software paradigms, OpenTravel enables stakeholders to focus on articulating their needs, entrusting the compiler to handle intricate details, thus streamlining operations and enhancing efficiency across travel retail platforms.
Code: Open-Source Software
The principal enabler to reach our vision is an “offer” that acts as a container for the travel product or service to be sold. This offer serves as a comprehensive package, incorporating product description, price, and rules into a single, actionable object, eliminating the need for additional messages to present and sell the product to customers. Currently, achieving a look to book ratio of 10:1 is considered excellent, but more often, it extends to hundreds or even thousands to one, requiring numerous costly messages to secure a single booking. The offer container, functioning akin to a digital truck, is agnostic to the product, price, and rules, merely transporting what the supplier wishes to sell on the market. Suppliers can tailor offers with their own rules, enabling applicability to all customers, specific personas, or individual customers, which is also recognized as omnichannel personalization. This adaptable offer can be processed by any channel adhering to standards, and consistency in processing is ensured through open-source functions for managing offers provided by the foundation. Various channels may layer proprietary AI-based features for “shop” processes on top of these consistent behaviors, regardless of who is processing the offers. Order handling will largely mirror current methods, with slight adjustments to accommodate the offer structure.
Tools: Model Driven Development
Model driven development means using an object-oriented model, a model that more closely captures data in a way that developers work and can be used by tooling to create APIs and code. Objects combine data and behavior and use structure to define relationships. Once objects are established, they can be used again and again, but it’s also a simple process to create an extension for a proprietary solution. Think of this as a 3D printer model that can be reused and updated to produce real artifacts. This automation reduces the labor and time needed to product high quality APIs.
OpenTravel is dedicated to making a meaningful impact in the travel industry. Join us in shaping the future of travel technology by supporting interoperability and innovation. Fill out the form below to learn how you can get involved!
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