OpenTravel Alliance
trade association
The OpenTravel Alliance is a not-for-profit trade association founded in 1999.
Mission
OpenTravel's mission is to engineer specifications to ensure traveler and supplier information flow smoothly throughout travel, tourism and hospitality. OpenTravel creates, expands and drives adoption of open specifications, including but not limited to the use of XML, for the electronic exchange of business information among all sectors of the travel industry. OpenTravel's schema design supports W3C, IATA and ISO standards.
Members of the OpenTravel Alliance include airlines, hotel companies, car rental companies, cruise lines, railways, global distribution systems, distribution companies, solutions providers, software developers and consultants.
History
OpenTravel was founded in 1999 by a consortium of travel companies - including air, hotel, car rental, and supporting software companies - with a primary focus on the creation of electronic message structures to facilitate communication between the disparate systems in the global travel industry. The OpenTravel Alliance presented their concepts at its first OpenTravel Advisory Forum meeting on May 25, 1999, in Atlanta, Georgia.
The driving force behind the adoption of an XML standard throughout the travel industry was the hopes of eliminating one of the major impediments blocking a full conversion to electronic tickets. Before the creation of OpenTravel messaging, passengers who with electronic tickets had to wait in line to receive a paper ticket from their initial airline if a flight has been canceled and they want to try to switch to another carrier. In addition, airline employees would need to fill out a handwritten "flight interruption manifest" for each ticketholder who's looking to rebook elsewhere.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “OpenTravel Alliance” as trade association. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as trade association. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2025541. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1999.
Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “OpenTravel Alliance”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow OpenTravel Alliance primary sources, OpenTravel Alliance archive and OpenTravel research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “OpenTravel Alliance”?
- Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “OpenTravel Alliance” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.