Time to Tear Down Travel Technology Walls in 2025

The Berlin Wall, erected in 1961, separated East and West Berlin, symbolizing the deep division between communism and democracy during the Cold War. The Wall was built to prevent East Germans from fleeing to the democratic West, but it also suppressed cultural exchange, economic development, and the unity of families.

At the request (demand) of President Ronald Regan, “Mr. Gorbachev tore down this wall” in 1989^*.  

The act of tearing down the wall became a global emblem of freedom and the dismantling of boundaries that hinder collaboration, communication, and progress. As we look into the challenges of travel management in 2025, we should focus attention on the “virtual walls” in today’s travel technology sector, where walls of competition continue to stifle innovation and growth.

Competition Doesn't Have to Mean Cloistering

Much like the Berlin Wall divided a city, industries today build their own walls through aggressive competition, proprietary systems and exclusive ecosystems. While competition is a natural driver of progress, excessive siloing can impede the very collaboration needed to address global challenges in our managed travel ecosystem.

The technology industry, overall, is rife with examples of walls that isolate rather than bridges that connect. From incompatible operating systems to proprietary software and restricted access to critical APIs, these barriers prioritize short-term market dominance over long-term innovation.

Issues like data silos and patent wars demonstrate how walls in technology hinder progress. For example, proprietary approaches to artificial intelligence and machine learning models prevent broader collaboration, slowing down the development of solutions to global issues like climate change, healthcare and education.

One lesson from tearing down the Berlin Wall is the importance of openness. When East and West Berliners reunited, they unleashed a wave of cultural, economic and intellectual exchange. In technology, this openness could translate to the adoption of open-source platforms, shared standards and cross-industry collaborations. It has the potential to encourage innovation, collaboration and personalization—all to benefit frequent travelers, travel managers and procurement managers. It also stands to create shareholder value through employee and system productivity and savings.

Breaking Down Today’s Walls

To tear down the walls of competition in corporate travel technology, we need both top-down and bottom-up efforts. Companies from TMCs to OBTs, to TSPs (travel services providers) must prioritize interoperability and common standards to ensure technologies work seamlessly across ecosystems. We don’t have a good track record: It took IATA a decade to develop a standard for E-Tickets and that’s a consortium of airlines with common interests!

The OpenAI initiative itself serves as an example of a better mindset, as it seeks to democratize access to AI technologies for the benefit of humanity. Similarly, partnerships like the Connectivity Standards Alliance, which developed the Matter standard for smart home devices, show how collaboration can create better outcomes for both businesses and consumers. 

Unified Business Travel Future Starts Today

The business travel industry needs to take the note: The walls of competition in travel technology can and should be dismantled to foster innovation, equity and shared progress. By embracing openness and collaboration, competing travel technologies can create a future where innovation knows no borders, and benefits are shared instead of possessively retained for commercial monopolies. Consider a real example: an expense system that only accepts a PNR post-ticketing from as few as one vendor (in some cases its own). 

In 2025, the roadmap for dismantling corporate travel technology barriers includes:

• A common traveler profile structure that interoperates among suppliers, check out this BTN op-ed from more than a 20 years ago.
• Standardized savings codes and reason codes (you saved $ or you didn’t) we don’t need one for every letter of the alphabet.
• Plug-and-play travel technology modules from look to book to ticket to expense, instead of monolithic technology platforms.
• Airline ticketing instructions scanned via optical character recognition and built into quality control and ticketing systems that work across all IATA numbers in a BSP Region (for language and currency purposes).
• Hotel names mapped to a hotel ID (no more Bates Motel/The Bates Motel/Bates White Pine Bay Motel).

All these reflect long-standing partitions in the travel technology and settlement ecosystem. As we reflect on the lessons of the past, the key question becomes: What kind of Global Corporate Travel Universe do we want to build? 

The answer lies not in isolating ourselves behind walls but in tearing them down. Not just one brick at a time, but quickly and as many walls as possible to enable the mutual collaboration that benefits both buyers and suppliers. If there was ever a time to do it, it’s 2025!

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^* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tear_down_this_wall!