India bets on an open digital infrastructure for tourism

India has just rolled out what Skift calls a digital tourism stack: an open infrastructure designed to make its highly fragmented supply easy to discover, book and, eventually, surface in artificial intelligence answers. The idea, according to Skift's analysis, is that this open ecosystem becomes a shared layer for small hotels, local agencies and operators that until now relied on intermediaries just to exist online.

The problem it tries to solve is no small one. In a market with thousands of scattered suppliers, a big chunk of the offering never shows up on the channels where today's traveller actually looks. An open stack can hand them a direct route into distribution and, in time, into the AI assistants starting to recommend destinations and accommodation.

My take: it is an interesting move. If it works, it does not just tidy up India's supply, it gives smaller players ammunition to compete on equal footing with the big chains. The question is whether the rollout keeps pace with the market or stays a nice announcement. That is where we will see.