Open-Source Travel Retail For Technology Providers
Personalized trip level experiences accessible from any device combining any travel product such as air, car, hotel, cruise, rail, ground transportation, along with things to do, restaurants, golf, tours, conventions, amusements parks, to provide the best experience for travel customers.
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Current messaging protocols, rooted in standards from the 1960s, are outdated and insufficient for modern needs.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 were 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
Vendor Specific Issues
Providing solutions to travel distribution retail is challenging due to the inconsistency of travel reservation or distribution systems. While most are based on some standards like to messages provided by Open Travel for 25 years now, each implementation is still unique. This greatly affects those providing solutions that need to interact with the travel systems such as travel app providers or anyone trying to propose AI based solutions. While less affected, infrastructure providers such as cloud, security, automation, data management and so on find architecturally these travel systems can be wildly different. The result being nearly every implementation is bespoke, requiring both parties to potentially face large labor expenses for customization. This adds delays and costs to a successful implementation.
Similarly, another issue is the size of the market. There is a very finite number of airlines, rail operations, hotel brands and properties, cruise lines, etc. Building flexible solutions for this market is cost prohibitive given the size of the market to recoup the investment. The result is engagements mostly based on consulting and customizations (labor) rather than commodity products. For startups wanting to provide a retail channel the situation is even worse. Very high labor costs to create solutions that can interoperate with the chaos of bespoke backend systems.
There is an underserved market that represents enormous opportunity for technology providers. While there is a finite number of travel companies in the current market there is an immeasurable number of smaller travel experience providers. Consider tour operators (including dive shops, helicopter tours, fishing, etc.), smaller boutique hotels, vacation rentals, restaurants, museums, conferences, and innumerable other “things to do” while traveling. This is the unreachable content mentioned in the opening paragraph. These products would have to be commoditized in their access methods to be viable for a mass market solution.
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 acquire and deliver travel products 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 while value added services go up. The foundation is about suppliers being able to publish rich, rule-based offers via any distribution channel who may then provide added value services such as bundling into an experience. This opens access to a broader market and new customers at a fraction of today’s integration cost
For solution and technology providers this implies several orders of magnitude increase in travel products being sold and the required technology to support that increase. Travel offers as objects in the cloud will number in the billions. The AI opportunity to customize travel solutions for billions of travelers globally. The immeasurable number of travel experience providers will require infrastructure and support. All funded by the increase in travel products presented as instantly actionable offers via the Open Travel Foundation actions.
Unifying Vision
Together, we’re building an open travel infrastructure where any travel product 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. An open foundation that delivers commodity function at a low cost, 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!
