The Union Ministry of Tourism has proposed setting up a National Digital Tourism Mission. In this regard an inter-ministerial Task Force has been set-up to undertake consultations with the tourism industry and domain experts, define the context, mission, vision, objectives, and overall scope of the National Digital Tourism Mission.

The Task Force has prepared a draft report on proposed National Digital Tourism Mission, which inter-alia lays down domain and technology principles, standards, digital stack, governance structure and plan for implementation. The Ministry of Tourism has invited final comments from the stakeholders on draft report for setting up of National Digital Tourism Mission.

The vision of National Digital Tourism Mission is to bridge the existing information gap among different stakeholders of tourism ecosystem through a digital highway.

The National Digital Tourism Mission envisages achieving the objective of harnessing the full potential of digitisation in tourism sector by facilitating exchange of information and services in tourism sector spreading across national and state tourism organisations, tourism service providers, tourism destinations, products, experiences and tourists.

The draft takes note of the fact that tourism sector is highly fragmented. Subsectors of tourism such as transport, accommodation, restaurants and catering, and personal services are all subject to very different challenges and opportunities.

It has also been noted that most of the tourism systems developed by the Centre, state governments, public and private sector function in silos. As a result, the tourism ecosystem is unable to harvest the combinatorial benefits of information exchange. Data systems currently don’t interact with each other using a common language, thereby curtailing data analytics and resultant policy-making. In order to overcome the same, there is need for seamless standardised data exchange amongst various stakeholders.