Travel technology is the software that lets you search, book and pay for a trip, together with the software that airlines, bus operators and travel companies run underneath it. It is often called travel tech.
Consider a long weekend. You live in Bengaluru, and you want to spend it in Goa. On Wednesday evening, you open one travel app. You book a Friday flight, a hotel near the beach for three nights and a sleeper bus back on Monday night. The whole trip takes about ten minutes to book. Several layers of software take part in those ten minutes.
The first layer is online travel booking: the sites and apps where trips are sold. The best known is the online travel agency (OTA), an app that searches flights, hotels, trains and buses and sells them. The OTA does not own any of these seats or rooms. It sells them on behalf of the airlines, hotels and operators, and it earns a commission, a share of each booking. Your bus seat came from online bus ticketing. Train tickets are sold through train booking apps, which also predict whether a waitlisted ticket will be confirmed. Small travel agents book for their own customers on a B2B travel portal.
The second layer is the airline IT systems. The travel app usually gets its fares and seats from a global distribution system (GDS), a network that connects airlines and hotels to travel sites and agents. Each airline keeps its own bookings and seats in its passenger service system (PSS). The same system checks you in at the airport and prints your boarding pass.
The third layer is international trip planning. A first trip abroad needs a visa, a plan for each day and a way to pay in a foreign currency. An online visa application service checks your documents, and an AI trip planner drafts each day of the trip.
The fourth layer is corporate travel management. When your employer sends you on a work trip, its travel app shows only the flights and hotels that the company allows. After the trip, your receipts become an expense claim.
The hotel has its own systems. They keep each room's price and availability the same on every travel site. They are covered in hotel technology.
One problem appears in every layer. The same seat or room is offered on many sites at the same moment, and prices change by the minute. So every system must close a seat everywhere the moment it is sold. This is called multichannel inventory management. Much of the world's travel software is written in India. The largest distribution and airline software companies run big engineering centres in Bengaluru and Pune.