A 2019 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report on the future of tourism highlighted changes in travel demand and supply due to technological advances as important trends shaping the future of tourism. The report stressed the need for suppliers in the industry to actively respond to these trends, especially as technological innovations such as digital platforms, the Internet of Things (IoT),  artificial intelligence (AI), and virtual reality (VR) are expected to change the tourism experience significantly.

Many of the report’s OECD predictions are now coming true, as demographic change and an evolving social structure along with advances
in digital technology are now driving change on the supply side of the tourism industry. On the demand side, we can observe increasing levels of diversification and personalization in tourism behavior with the emergence of new younger consumers (gen Z) and now more active seniors. There are many new products, services, and delivery methods using AI, big data, and immersive technologies to respond to new, more diversified demand. In particular, the rise of online travel agencies (OTAs), coupled with the use of digital technology, has led to the rapid spread of platform-oriented transactions.

More intensive use of digital technology and the increasingly popularity of platform-oriented transactions have not only led to new convergence between formerly divergent technologies and industries — spawning entirely new lines of business in the process — they have altered the fabric of the tourism industry ecosystem. In this article, we describe what businessto-business (B2B) technologies are and the implicationsfor policy carried by our findings.

Travel-tech, a portmanteau of travel and tech-nology, refers to ICT travel services that are more advanced than traditional online platform
services such as OTAs.

The advent of travel-tech can be traced back to the early 2010s, when tourism startups first emerged based on business models differentiated from existing tourism services. Traditionally, tourism has been a business-to-customer (B2C) industry, where potential travelers interact with service and product providers on a face-toface basis. The internet and mobile revolutions saw travel agencies move their offerings online, but this did not fundamentally change the B2C nature of the business. Travel-tech companies have also digitized their service offerings with more advanced technologies than online travel agencies, but many remain in the B2C sector, where most customers are travelers themselves. The uneven weighting of the distribution of B2C and B2B companies in travel sector is evident in a list of 250 travel tech startups published by Skift in 2016. An image from the report is reproduced as Figure 1. B2B firms are in red and B2C firms in green. The size of the circles represents relative revenues.