Welcome
A high performance data standard is transforming the travel industry: The Open Travel Data Standard OTDS facilitates travel offers performing on highest data quality levels into the travel sales channels. The modern XML standard accelerates and specifies the production of travel offers while at the same time delivering significantly more booking relevant details and number of data records.
The travellers benefit from a comprehensive and meaningful travel offer matching their search terms which in addition can be narrowed down to their individual whishes via filters. Last but not least reliable pricings and availability declarations ease the way to booking conversion.
OTDS stands for the Open Travel Data Standard – a powerful data format developed from experts within the travel industry to serve the branch. All interested market player may use the format and its extensive documentation free of charge.
The XML-format OTDS contains all master data of the included travel components as well as all necessary product and pricing rules. Travel providers may use OTDS to distribute their offer into all sales channels, whether it be to travel agencies or to travel websites.
The Open Travel Data Standard OTDS is published by the OTDS association (OTDS e.V.) in Berlin, Germany. The members of the association represent almost every branch of the travel industry and join forces to continuously refine and extend the data format OTDS.
Via the committees of the association each member is actively involved in the decision-making process and into the development roadmap and realisation. The joint future development of OTDS and the communication between the members takes places within the exclusive internet-based member’s forum.
OTDS registration
News & Events
ReisenAKTUELL goes for the OTDS format
As of October 1, 2024, ReisenAKTUELL will be a member of the OTDS association. The owner-managed tour operator from Koblenz since 2010 […]
OTDS General Meeting elects Michael Aubermann to Board of Directors
At this year’s general meeting of the OTDS Association on July 2, one of the tasks was to fill the position of […]
OTDS association grieves the loss of Michael Fischerkeller
We are deeply saddened by the loss of our board colleague Michael Fischerkeller. As CIO of our member company vtours, Michael had […]
THE OTDS STANDARD
What is the OTDS format capable of and what makes it so special?
How does OTDS support tour operators and sales channels?
Strengths of OTDS - The data format OTDS is designed to improve the transmission of provider’s product data such as tour operators, airlines, rental car companies, or other supplier to the distribution systems that process those data for the use in travel search tools used in travel agencies or in travel website booking engines.
Fast
OTDS significantly minimizes the production time for data exports of tour operators or their Inventory Management Systems. Compared to the standards used to date such as INFX or KATI the production time is reduced by at least 75 percent. In addition incremental updates allow for deliveries of parts of the portfolio with the corresponding reduced file generation time.
Compact
Thanks to OTDS tour operators and other provider may decrease the volume of their data delivery to distribution systems significantly: In practice sizes for OTDS-files reach no more than 10% of the size for INFX-deliveries containng the same amount of offers. As with OTDS rather price- and product rules than complete offers are expressed, considerably more offers can be transferred in even smaller files. The effect on transfer- and loading times is correspondingly positive – while at the same time data quality is pushed to a higher level.
Precise
Due to the precise definition of price- and product rules by the tour operator in OTDS there is no scope for interpretation when processing the data. As a result the data quality increases – trips are displayed with reliably calculated prices and availabilities within the consulting tools of travel agencies and in the IBEs. Also total prices for families are feasible.
In general with OTDS 95% of all prices are identical with those of the booking request. More that 90% of the trips are available and bookable.
Free of charge
OTDS as the open, nonproprietary standard is available free-of-charge and may be used by any tour operator- and distribution system – regardless of the technology deployed (e.g. central caches or local player). This ensures independence from proprietary data standards or -formats for tour operators and distribution systems.
Extensive
OTDS already allows the transfer of all data for the most relevant travel components accommodation, flight, packaged travel as well as add-on services such as transfers, rental cars, insurances, activities, or parking lots. In addition OTDS contains all product- and price rules necessary for correct price calculation. All relevant information needed for product display, availability check, booking requests and the booking itself are also included.
Compatible
OTDS is compatible for various systems: it is the powerful standard of choice for providing travel data to central cache systems as well as all filling players located in the sphere of the supplier. OTDS also supports different external attribution systems for describing the travel products such as Giata Facts and DRV GlobalTypes.
SEE THE OTDS STANDARD FOR YOURSELF
The leading distribution systems in the German market already interpret and process OTDS. By doing so, the optimized data are available within their frontoffice tools for travel agencies as well as in their internet booking engines. The tour operator webpages also can be equipped with the enhanced OTDS-data, so that customers searching for travel offers in travel agencies or in the internet can rely on meaningful offers with reliable pricing and availability information and including add-on services. The OTDS format allows for significantly more details, options, room- and flight alternatives.
Families can rely on the total price of a trip when transmitted with OTDS from the very first display on. Price corrections resulting from booking requests are omitted thanks to reliable adult- and children prices and explicit rules for the price calculation in dynamically packaged travel offers.
The travel industry works with a large number of data formats. Those formats help to display the countless travel offers of tour operators and other provider that reach the consumer via various distribution channels. All information about a trip are being processed so that the IT systems within the distribution chain can depict those data.
But the travel wishes of the consumer today are much more individual than ten years ago – the travel offers have to meet this change. And also tour operators and other supplier, online portals and travel agencies expect more from the technology they use. Legacy data formats today cannot fulfill those expectations anymore.
So far provider in the travel industry had to translate their travel offers into several data formats in order to supply the various distribution channels. In spite of the many formats the provider often did not succeed in highlighting their specific competitive advantages: the one format lacks a space for submitting taxi transfers, the other format cannot deal with child price reductions or specific child care offers.
So a new, common, open format was needed that delivers all relevant information regarding a travel offer into all distribution channels. This is precisely the intention of OTDS. At the same time it shall reflect the requirements of as many market player as possible and refine itself as an open data format. Thanks to the cost-free download at this website OTDS is freely accessible to all interested travel organisations and thus can establish itself as the future market standard.
OTDS versions - OTDS 1.0 was published by the OTDS association in April 2012. Within this first basic version the travel components accomodation, flight, packaged travel and add-on services such as transfer, rental car, parking, insurances etc. together with all the implicated product- and pricing rules already could be represented.
Version OTDS 1.9.3 provided comprehensive options for flight prioritisation and rules for rounding monetary amounts. Together with the multi-currency option and further diversified possibilities for rental cars and insurances those criteria meet the requirements of many tour operator regarding an efficient and extensive display of their travel products in the distribution systems.
With the main version 2.0, non-bookable content elements such as descriptive texts and media content as well as the ability for multilingualism were integrated. Thanks to the introduction of the Compare construct, product components can be combined much more flexibly under predefined conditions. The Accomodation-, Flight- and AddonWrapper allow the mapping of a sequence of flights and several hotels with rooms, meals and durations - an important basis for round trips in OTDS.
The current version OTDS 2.1 as new features among others offers a revision of the BookingNameSpace, introduces @Class to properties and extends the update option for tags.
OTDS in Use
A continuously rising number of provider from various areas of the travel industry use OTDS in order to fuel their travel offers to their customers quickly and reliably.
Distribution channels and systems can feed on an extensive variety of travel offer data delivered in the up-to-date OTDS format for travel agency tools and Internet Booking Engines:
Testimonials
“OTDS: a flexible and living standard, that optimally displays the enormous product diversity of dozens of WBS-tour operators – without converter or third parties. Highest performance in terms of quality and quantity!”
“OTDS is just fun”
“OTDS offers unlimited possibilities for travel offers and overcomes the limitations of other formats.”
Hotel-only, Package travel and flight data in OTDS
Among others the following provider deliver their portfolio of offers in OTDS already or provide it via an OTDS-Player.
"Entire offering" includes the hotel-only, package- and X-offerings of a tour operator brand. The list does not claim to be complete.
- AIDA (entire offering in Bewotec OTDS-Player for aida.de)
- Aldiana (live in Amadeus, Schmetterling and Traffics)
- Alltours (entire offering live in Amadeus, Schmetterling and Traffics)
- Anex (Hotel-only and packaged trips live in Amadeus, Schmetterling and Traffics)
- anixe (bedbank, Hotel-only data-delivery)
- Bentour Reisen (entire offering live in Amadeus, Schmetterling and Traffics)
- Bucher Reisen (entire offering live in Amadeus, Schmetterling and Traffics)
- byebye (entire offering live in Amadeus, Schmetterling and Traffics)
- Center Parks (OTDS production by Bewotec, integration in Amadeus ongoing)
- Connected Destination (Hotel-only and packaged trips live in Traffics)
- Coral Travel (entire offering and travel type KISS live in Amadeus, Schmetterling and Traffics)
- Coral Travel Switzerland (entire offering live in Amadeus)
- DERTOUR (entire offering live in Amadeus, Schmetterling and Traffics)
- dta Touristik (Hotel-only and packaged trips live in Amadeus)
- ECCO-Reisen (entire offering live in Amadeus)
- ETI (entire offering live in Amadeus, Schmetterling and Traffics, OTDS in website)
- EuroParcs Ferienparks (Hotel-only data converted into OTDS by ISO, live in Amadeus)
- Flamingo Tours (Hotel-only live in Amadeus)
- Gruber Reisen (entire offering in Bewotec OTDS-Player, live in Amadeus)
- Helvetic Tours (Hotel-only and packaged trips live in Amadeus, Schmetterling and Traffics)
- ITS, ITS Billa und ITS Coop (entire offering live in Amadeus, Schmetterling and Traffics)
- Jahn (entire offering live in Amadeus, Schmetterling and Traffics)
- Kuoni (entire offering live in Amadeus, Schmetterling and Traffics)
- Luxair Tours (entire offering live in Amadeus)
- Meiers Weltreisen (entire offering live in Amadeus, Schmetterling and Traffics)
- Misir (entire offering in Bewotec OTDS-Player)
- Neckermann Reisen (entire offering live in Amadeus, Schmetterling and Traffics)
- Öger Tours (entire offering live in Amadeus, Schmetterling and Traffics)
- Olimar (entire offering live in Amadeus, Schmetterling and Traffics, OTDS for website)
- Palma (Hotel-only and Packaged trips live in Traffics)
- Phoenix (Hotel-only and Packaged trips live in Amadeus)
- Schauinsland-Reisen (entire offering live in Amadeus, Schmetterling and Traffics)
- Sonnenklar-TV (Hotel-only and packaged trips live in Amadeus and Traffics)
- Travel Partner (Hotel-only also in combination with Addon-Services in various channels)
- TravelTrex
- TUI (TUI Germany/Switzerland, Airtours DE/CH, XTUI: entire offering live in Amadeus, Schmetterling and Traffics)
- TUI Cruises (offering available in Bewotec OTDS-Player and on TUI Cruises website)
- Urlaubstouristik (entire offering live in Amadeus)
- vtours (VTOI live in Traffics)
- Windrose Finest Travel (Hotel-only and packaged trips live in Amadeus and Schmetterling)
Flight content in the OTDS format is provided by the travel technology solution providers of Bewotec via its Flex Flight Player (click here for Bewotec airline list) and Ypsilon.net (click here for Ypsilon airline list).
OTDS Association
The OTDS association
The “Verein zur Förderung eines offenen touristischen Datenstandards e.V.” (Association to promote an Open Travel Data Standard, OTDS e.V. in Berlin, Germany) specifies and develops the data format OTDS for the travel industry. OTDS is based on open, nondiscriminatory, and standardized technologies. The data format is freely available and free-of-charge to everyone, especially to enterprises within the travel industry – regardless of a membership within the OTDS e.V.
OTDS – a modern data standard
It is the objective of the OTDS e.V. to establish its state-of-the-art data format OTDS as a market-wide standard for transmitting all product data relevant for distribution between provider/tour operators and distribution systems. The format is open and non-proprietary. OTDS is independent from any technology concepts and can be used with central caching systems as well as with decentralized player-hub solutions.
Constitution
The OTDS e.V. constitution (Version of March 2013) can be downloaded here.
The constitution defines the objective of the association, explains the membership-status with its privileges and duties, describes the institutions within the organisation as well as their tasks, and lists further regulations.
Members
The OTDS association as of today has 31 members. They represent almost all areas of the travel industry as well as several markets: tour operators, supplier, touristic distribution systems, travel technology supplier, and associations. The OTDS e.V. offers members comprehensive support for their implementation of the data standard as well as the opportunity to actively promote the development of the format by becoming active in the OTDS member forum. Here, the extensive Thematic Specification, which - unlike the Technical Specification - is reserved only for the members of the Association, is also stored.
You may request extensive information on the membership in the form below.
The member companies include:
The Board of Directors
The executive committee is the leading organ of OTDS e.V. and is elected by the members for three years. In the election in June 2023 Ömer Karaca (Schmetterling) was elected Chairman of the Board. Vice Chairmen are Michael Becher (Bewotec) and Deniz Ugur (Bentour). Michael Aubermann (a-five), Haiko Gerdes (TraSo), Thorsten Hendricks (Schauinsland-Reisen), and Lothar Schmitz (Amadeus Leisure IT) complete the Board of Directors.
OTDS Association – 8 good reasons for membership
- Active participation in the further development of OTDS
- Personal contacts for support and questions
- Exclusive access to the extensive Thematic specification
- Introduce your own requirements
- Influence on the development of the association
- Information and exchange in the OTDS member forum
- Image effects and public impact
- The ideal factor
Become a Member
Here you can request non-binding information about a membership:
* required
Contact
If you have any questions regarding OTDS, the OTDS association or if you are interested in a membership or in becoming a supporter, please contact us via the contact form.
You can request access to OTDS schema definition and OTDS documentation here.
You can request information about the membership and the OTDS association itself here.
Address
OTDS e.V.
Lietzenburger Straße 99
10707 Berlin, Germany
Fon: +49 (0) 30 284 06 29
Fax: +49 (0) 30 284 06 30