OpenTravel Alliance Joins Overture Maps Foundation to Power Connected, AI-Ready Travel Infrastructure

Open data and geospatial IDs to deliver smarter bookings, richer maps, and seamless machine-to-machine travel coordination

Open Source Summit, Amsterdam – August 25, 2025 – The OpenTravel Alliance (OTA), the leading data standards organization for the travel industry and a member of the Linux Foundation, today announced it has joined the Overture Maps Foundation (Overture), another Linux Foundation initiative focused on building reliable and interoperable open map data for global use. By joining Overture, OTA will work with another leading consortium to resolve one of the travel industry’s most persistent challenges: standardizing location data across the highly fragmented ecosystem of travel providers, platforms, and markets by establishing open, interoperable mapping frameworks.

Overture’s open dataset already includes more than 60 million places of interest, each with standardized names, categories, and addresses. Its technical foundation includes the newly released Global Entity Reference System (GERS), a reference framework that unifies how locations are identified and integrated. By utilizing GERS, each hotel, vacation rental, airport shuttle, or train station receives a unique, persistent identifier that works across all platforms and systems. By eliminating the need to manually reconcile data from different sources, GERS streamlines how location data enters travel systems, reduces integration times from weeks to minutes, and accelerates the delivery of new location-aware services.

“The travel industry has long struggled to unify data about where things are, especially across fast-changing and inconsistently named places like bus and train stations and local attractions,” said Stuart Waldron, director of the OpenTravel Alliance. “By integrating OpenTravel’s object models with Overture’s foundational open data and GERS framework, we aim to lay the groundwork for smarter, safer, and more connected global travel experiences.”

From Fragmented Data to Frictionless Travel

OTA’s contributions to Overture are intended to pave the way for members to freely build upon and enrich a single source of truth for places data. While Overture does not directly handle dynamic updates such as station hours or real-time transit availability, these types of rich data can be attached to GERS IDs, enabling them to be integrated into widely used systems. These systems ultimately reach billions of consumers through applications powered by Overture members such as Tripadvisor, Uber, Esri and founders AWS, Meta, Microsoft, and TomTom.

Use cases for shared data include:

• A connected travel ecosystem: GERS IDs support a seamless web of data, improving coordination across travel discovery, booking, and in-trip experiences. A hotel booking system can share precise location data with a ride-sharing app, local restaurant or tour operator using a common GERS ID.
  
  
• Richer map experiences: A stable, open base map allows developers to add travel-specific data layers. With OTA, the travel sector aligns on schemas for real-time details like hotel availability, room rate, and pet-friendly policies, allowing attribute data and other amenity updates, all linked to a GERS ID.
  
  
• Future innovations: Forward-looking applications may include lightweight open standards anchored in GERS IDs that would make AI agents for businesses discoverable. A traveler’s AI assistant could then programmatically communicate with a hotel's AI to ask questions or make a reservation, opening a new frontier for automated travel services.

“The travel industry is a prime example of a sector that relies on accurate, interoperable location data, but has been held back by a patchwork of inconsistent identifiers and siloed systems,” said Marc Prioleau, executive director of the Overture Maps Foundation. “By working with OpenTravel and its network of data providers, we’re applying Overture’s open, scalable map infrastructure to create a unified foundation to support smarter experiences, not only for travelers, but also for the AI agents and applications acting on their behalf.”

In the coming months, OTA and Overture plan to align OTA’s existing location schemas and definitions to GERS IDs to enable seamless adoption. Over time, OTA’s compiler may allow updates from members to flow directly into Overture’s datasets, ensuring that the travel industry’s most authoritative data remains current, accessible, and open, without requiring OTA members to rework their internal systems.

The OpenTravel Alliance invites travel providers, booking platforms, and transit agencies to join this effort to build an open, shared map of the world’s travel infrastructure. To participate or learn more, visit opentravel.org or contact us.

About the Open Travel Alliance

OpenTravel Alliance is passionate about solving the challenges of connecting multiple systems within the complex travel distribution ecosystem. Our mission is to enable the future of travel by driving the evolving AI driven digital experience for consumers. OpenTravel Alliance creates, expands and drives adoption of open specifications — including XML and JSON — with partners such as LF OpenAPI which is incorporated into our tooling for the electronic exchange of business information across all sectors of the travel industry.

Our membership includes airlines, hotel companies, car rental firms, cruise lines, railways, tour operators, travel agencies, solutions providers and technology vendors. Billions of OpenTravel message structures are used daily, carrying billions of messages between trading partners.

Future innovations, partnering with Overture and other LF foundations, will be to deliver universal open travel offers allowing all travel related products to be published for sale in a consistent secure digital means sellable by any retailer with an agreement with the product owner. A key enabler of AI agents in this space. Learn more about offers.

Founded in 1999 as a not-for-profit trade association, OTA became a member of The Linux Foundation in 2020 and continues to evolve while maintaining its essential role in standardizing travel industry messaging. For more information, visit www.opentravel.org.