India bets on an open digital tourism stack

India has just put its tourism supply behind a shared digital layer, an open stack designed to make a market that has always been stubbornly fragmented easier to search, book and, eventually, surface through AI. That is the headline from Skift, and it is a bigger deal than it sounds.

The logic is simple. India has enormous tourism supply, from big hotel groups to thousands of independent properties, homestays and small operators, and most of it has never been consistently discoverable. A shared digital infrastructure layer promises to change that by giving all that inventory one common language for search and distribution. For hoteliers, that means a route to be found without buying their way into every OTA silo separately. For the booking engines and channel managers, it means a new surface where their clients can actually show up.

My read: this is the direction travel tech should be heading. Open infrastructure does not replace the PMS or the revenue manager, it gives them a cleaner pipe. The hard part is adoption, and the smart money is on the players who build the connectors, not the ones who keep hoarding inventory behind closed walls. If India pulls this off, it becomes the template every fragmented market will want to copy.