What is an adventure? That is easy. What describes and defines an adventure? That is much harder. Is it name/description/experience level? Is it destination/category/comfort level? How do you capture the essences of the experience in words and multimedia? Perhaps real justice can't be done to the experience, but an attempt is important for sales and marketing. What does a traveler need to know about an adventure to be excited/inspired/comfortable enough to book?
Adventure Central is working with the Open Travel Alliance, and other members of the Adventure/Experiential travel industry, to create standards for communicating "tours" (adventures and experiences) between partners. These standards define the facets of information about the tour, availability and even booking information.
What does this mean for the adventure industry? A way for the tour operator to capture the salient details of an adventure, and a way to share that data with others; distribution partners, online travel agencies (OTAs), even provide service to industry partners (resellers.) One import/export format for all these uses and more is as yet undiscovered. Capturing this data in an Internet-ready format will significantly increase access to these experiences, giving it a much wider audience.
A picture speaks a thousand words, and excitement sells adventure, so the standards must support images, video and other media types going far beyond text. References (web hyperlinks) can be made to external sources of information, e.g. traveler reviews on ATTA's adventure travel site. Metadata (descriptive data about the trip data) such as destination, category, experience required, comfort level, and more are supported.
Clearly there is a challenge to any standardization effort when there are so many great flavours of adventure; from single-day local adventures to multi-day remote destinations, from soft/experiential to hard/extreme, from packaged to custom. There needs to be flexibility within the standard to cover as much as possible, whilst preserving simplicity. First phase is to describe the adventure, upon demand convey scheduling/availability information, and perform/record a booking.
Such a standard is an ongoing venture, and will mature best with industry input; from tour operators, from distribution partners, even from travelers. Feel free to join the Open Travel Alliance and become a member of this working group, or convey your thoughts to us at Adventure Central using OpenTravel@AdventureCentral.com.
Adventure Central is pleased to participate in this endeavour, and feels it is one more step along the path of connecting the world to great adventures.
- Adam Jack, Adventure Central.
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