From Itineraries to Intelligence: How AI, SSI and Autonomous Systems Redefine Traveltech

Alex Bainbridge, CEO and founder of Autoura, delivered a ~29-minute keynote at ITB Berlin 2026 titled 'From Itineraries to Intelligence,' arguing that the travel industry cannot unlock meaningful AI-driven personalization without first solving the preferences data problem — and that decentralized identity (SSI) is the right architectural foundation for doing so. Bainbridge opened by establishing his credibility with a self-deprecating aside: he first presented on autonomous cars at ITB in 2018 and describes himself as 'right but early.' He used two simple audience participation moments — asking who likes steak, burgers, or is vegetarian — to demonstrate that preferences are distinct from identity: a vegetarian can tell a restaurant their dietary need without revealing who they are. This distinction became the conceptual spine of the talk.

Bainbridge argued that the industry currently talks about personalization but does not actually deliver it, and framed the current moment as a dual transition: in tourism, the shift is from static website-listed itineraries (dominant for roughly 20 years but not the historical norm — personalized tour design was the norm 150 years ago) to AI-designed experiences via chat interfaces. In hotels, the shift is from occupancy metrics to 'orchestration' — engineering the best possible stay. Both transitions require rich, portable preference data.

He contrasted two architectural approaches. Centralized architectures — exemplified by Expedia, Booking.com, Airbnb, and corporate travel management companies — lock preferences in a single retailer's database. He explained concretely why OTAs will not share this data even if they wanted to: GDPR creates an unresolvable liability chain the moment data is passed from OTA to hotel to restaurant. Decentralized architectures — analogous to email, which works across providers without the user needing to think about infrastructure — avoid this liability problem. He illustrated MCP (Model Context Protocol) as a clever but transitional centralized-ish solution: it lets Claude or ChatGPT pull preferences from a platform in real time. His prediction was explicit: 'I don't think we'll be using MCP in three years time.'

The decentralized alternative centers on DIDs (Decentralized Identifiers), which Bainbridge demoed by showing one of his own. He described DIDs as throwaway, short-lived credentials — a guest could share a DID with a bar valid for 4 hours, enabling preference exchange between AI agents, with no persistent newsletter subscription or data trail. He highlighted three capabilities DIDs unlock: progressive disclosure (a bar sees drink preferences but not boating interests), multiple concurrent profiles (one person can have separate business travel, leisure, and family leisure profiles), and GDPR-safe data sharing.

The majority of the session focused on HatPro (Hospitality and Travel Profile), an open schema Bainbridge has been co-developing for several years with a small core team (5–8 contributors) under the HTWG (Hospitality and Travel Working Group) of the Decentralized Identity Foundation. HatPro contains approximately 1,000 preference fields spanning hotels, tourism, airlines, car hire, and OTAs. He gave a concrete call to action: niche specialists (e.g., ski companies) are needed to contribute domain-specific preferences, estimating 30–40 additional ski-related fields as an example gap. Early adopters are hotel chains focused on five-star service — he declined to name them — plus a completed pilot project in the Middle East involving orchestration between airlines, hotels, and tour operators.

In the Q&A moderated by Dirk Rogl (Managing Director, Travel Commerce GmbH), Bainbridge was pressed on whether this would ever achieve the adoption needed to become a standard. He pointed to early hotel chain commitments and the Middle East pilot but acknowledged the industry's historical tendency toward centralization — noting that some hotels are now at 75% OTA bookings, whereas tourism has remained fragmented. His closing answer was both honest and cautionary: 'We haven't lost a fight yet in tourism. But the hoteliers have.'