The Tours and Activities Project is geared at providing industry-leading tour suppliers with new messages for booking and ticketing in addition to the existing search, availability and descriptive information (exchange) messages.
During the course of the project—which included converting business requirements into schema functional requirements—it was determined that a standardized tours vocabulary, improved tours schema modularity and reduced schema size was required to create a tool-friendly specification that reflects the changing way XML is designed, managed and consumed in today’s global internet-ready tours marketplace.
To address this need, the OpenTravel Enhanced Tours project team is now focused on identifying a common set of tour business objects that will comprise a 2011 specification that contains tour-specific search, availability, booking, ticketing and information exchange messages.
As an example, tour services, including individually tailored packages that incorporate more unusual experiences such as wildlife or native cultural experiences, by land, air and sea, daily activities, and sightseeing excursions all need to be supported for online browsing, comparison and booking to be effective.
