Blog

Perspectives on
AI-native travel

Protocol design, policy, and the future of the travel industry — from the team behind the Activity Travel Protocol. Four arcs. Every post stands alone.

The problem and the protocol

What is wrong with today's travel industry, and what the Activity Travel Protocol is

For general industry readers, OTAs, hotels, and anyone curious about AI in travel.

What is the Activity Travel Protocol?

The founding post. What the protocol is, what problem it solves, and why it matters now — interoperability, open standard, end-to-end itinerary, AI-enabled and safety-protected.

The Activity Travel Protocol and the global travel ecosystem

How the protocol fits into the existing global travel industry, and what it adds that Expedia, Booking.com, GetYourGuide, and Viator cannot provide.

How does the Activity Travel Protocol fit into existing travel standards?

Where the protocol sits relative to NDC, OpenTravel Alliance, and IATA — and why a new layer was needed.

The open protocol for the AI travel era

Big-picture framing for the industry: the AI travel era is arriving, and the infrastructure question is the one that matters most right now.

Business cases by sector

What the protocol does for specific parts of the travel industry

For hotels, OTAs, tour operators, activity providers, airlines, and insurers.

The travel agency of the AI era

What a travel agency looks like when AI agents do the assembling — and what role human expertise plays in the protocol's design.

Why every major OTA will need to support AI agent bookings

The commercial case for OTA adoption. Open standard vs proprietary AI booking stacks — and why the open standard wins.

Hotels: the complete guest experience, finally possible

Hotels want to offer guests a complete experience — accommodation, activities, transfers, dining — but fragmented systems make it nearly impossible. The protocol changes that.

Duty of care: the concept that changes everything

No industry standard has ever made duty of care machine-readable, trackable in real time, and transferable between suppliers in a documented chain. Until now.

What the Activity Travel Protocol means for travel insurance

A structured, machine-readable record of every supplier handoff, duty of care transfer, and disruption event — and what that means for how insurance is priced, triggered, and settled.

Small suppliers: how to participate in the AI travel economy

The protocol is designed for everyone, not just large platforms. What participation looks like for a small supplier, what they gain, and what is asked of them.

The KPOP Musical and the Pre-Arrangement Declaration

A KPOP musical opening on Broadway. Fans from thirty countries. How the protocol's Pre-Arrangement Declaration makes large-scale fan travel manageable.

One extended meeting, five cities, one very long day

A business traveller extends their stay in Istanbul by two days. Four suppliers, two jurisdictions, a duty of care chain that needs to update in real time.

Policy and regulation

Why regulators should care, and what reform looks like

For government bodies, policy makers, and travel industry press with regulatory interest.

For government regulators: what the Activity Travel Protocol enables

Three things regulators currently lack: a real-time Trust Chain, a machine-readable Jurisdiction Compliance Registry, and booking-level data for mass disruption coordination.

The gap in travel regulation that no one has addressed yet

Existing travel regulation was written for single-entity products and predictable disruptions. The AI-era package holiday does not fit that model. This post names the gaps.

What does regulatory reform for AI-era travel actually look like?

Having named the structural problems, this post proposes the specific provisions that modernised travel regulation should contain — drawn from a systematic review across five jurisdictions.

Technical foundations

How the protocol works under the hood

For developers, AI platform builders, and technically curious business readers.

The Booking Object: a new primitive for the travel industry

Travel has never had a runtime entity representing a booking in its entirety. The Booking Object is that missing primitive — UUID-identified, state-managed, append-only, and role-scoped.

How disruption handling works in the Activity Travel Protocol

Disruption is a formal Booking Object state, not a special case. How the protocol handles 340 typhoon-affected bookings in parallel — supplier notification, human escalation, and traveller welfare chains.

Building your first Activity Travel Protocol integration

Three integration surfaces, one protocol. REST/Webhook for existing systems, MCP Server for AI agents, Prompt Library for LLM personas. What a first integration looks like at each tier.

The Security Kernel: how the protocol enforces trust

Every consequential action passes through a single non-bypassable enforcement component. ODRL policy evaluation, mandate verification, and the CONFIRMATION hard cap — in sequence, every time.

AI agents in the Activity Travel Protocol — how they work

What an ATP Mandate JWT is, how eight authority scopes constrain agent behaviour, what the Windley Loop does before planning, and why no AI agent can confirm a booking without a human.

Verifiable credentials in travel: what the protocol verifies and why it matters

Traveller credentials, operator credentials — and why both are verified at every state transition, not just at onboarding. One submission, network-wide recognition.

The AI agent credential problem: a new kind of identity for Travel Operating Systems

The third credential category that has no precedent in travel: the AI agent credential. What the ATP Mandate JWT is, why it satisfies EU AI Act and IMDA Agentic AI Framework requirements, and why it matters.

The Activity Travel Protocol is an open protocol standard for the global travel industry. It enables the discovery, configuration, booking, fulfilment, and disruption management of complex travel experiences across multiple suppliers, jurisdictions, and AI agents.

The full specification is published at activitytravel.pro. Governed by the Activity Travel Protocol Foundation (in formation).