Press release: ODTA intensifies Europe-wide collaboration on tourism data standards

Frankfurt am Main, November 25, 2025 – Increasing demands driven by digital transformation – Open Data Tourism Alliance (ODTA) further develops its organizational structure

The use of AI in the international tourism industry is gaining momentum at a rapid pace. Chatbots, voice assistants, recommendation services based on AI agents, and automated content syndication are just a few examples.

Since its founding in 2023, the European alliance for standardizing semantic data models for tourism content, the Open Data Tourism Alliance (ODTA), has developed a total of 24 ‘Domain Specifications’ based on schema.org as a shared standard language. These now integrate tourism-relevant data into the structure of datasets, for example information on infrastructure, attractions, points of interest, events, certifications, tourist information centers, natural and protected areas, hiking routes, or sports facilities. Combined with new technological standards such as RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) or MCP (Model Context Protocol), this enables even faster and more precise data retrieval as well as more targeted matching of offerings to specific audiences. To meet the growing demands of the international travel industry and rising customer expectations, the ODTA is now further developing its organizational structure. Through more intensive communication and stronger participation of all partners, the aim is to anchor the importance of open, semantically structured data models more firmly among tourism organizations across Europe, increase the visibility of the ODTA, and attract new partners.

Petra Hedorfer, CEO of the German National Tourist Board (GNTB), explains: ‘Visibility is crucial for the tourism industry—today increasingly in search engines, AI-driven searches, and third-party applications. Only with structured, schema.org-based data can we ensure that our offerings are found and correctly interpreted. Moreover, open data enables secure cross-industry and cross-organizational use at the European level, as well as sovereign and trustworthy data sharing along the entire value chain. The GNTB Knowledge Graph, developed jointly with the regional tourism organizations, the Magic Cities, the German Convention Bureau, and the RDA International Coach Tourism Federation, is an excellent example of successful collaboration at the national level and an important building block for the European ODTA project. It strengthens system interoperability and marks a milestone in the digital transformation of the tourism sector.

Context: Digitalization of tourism through data standards
Cross-border, reliable data standards are already a prerequisite for the visibility of tourism offerings in search engines and AI-driven applications used by globally operating online travel platforms. As further digital innovations—such as AI-powered voice assistants or large language models in the international travel industry—and rising customer expectations gain momentum, the requirements for consistent data quality and system-wide data availability continue to grow. Within the ODTA, the partners have agreed on schema.org as their common standard language. Since schema.org can only represent tourism-related content to a limited extent due to its global orientation, the ODTA is developing extended ‘Domain Specifications’ as a foundation for the semantic description of tourism content.