By Albi Wiedersberg and Marc Prioleau
Imagine asking an AI agent to book a hotel. The agent books the room, finds restaurants you like, a concert venue nearby, and lines up ground transportation. This smooth, integrated experience is the future of travel. Today, it is nearly impossible.
Like many industries, travel has an “action barrier”. Finding the right flight or hotel is challenging; booking it is hard. This is caused by data complexity that costs money and frustrates customers.
Three data-related challenges cause this:
- Bad Data: Information about locations is different or wrong, causing bookings to fail.
- System Chaos: A single trip may require over 100 systems to connect, each speaking a different “language”.
- Being Skipped by AI: New AI assistants plan trips but may not know about specific travel providers and their offerings.
The Global Entity Reference System (GERS) is an open “common language” designed to solve these exact problems.
What is GERS?
GERS is a stable, open, and shared identifier for every place – a hotel, a rental car location, an airport terminal. This identifier persists across all data sources and vendors. It acts as a linking layer to enable interoperability and commerce across the entire travel ecosystem, freeing you from proprietary IDs and data and aligning the industry around a common standard.
It works in three simple ways:
- GERS gives each place one stable ID:
GERS gives each physical location its own unique ID. This ID acts as a “common language”. An AI agent, a navigation app, and a hotel’s booking system can all use this same ID to know they are talking about the exact same places (e.g., hotel). When a place’s details change (e.g., operating status), Overture updates the existing ID, without creating a duplicate. - GERS bridges to your current systems
You don’t need to replace your old systems. GERS works on top of them using a “Bridge File,” which is a simple, private lookup table. This table matches your internal IDs to the GERS IDs, connecting your system to everyone else. - GERS makes your locations discoverable
Including your Points of Interest (POIs) in Overture’s open dataset ensures they receive a GERS ID and are published in Overture’s data. This allows developers building with Overture data to discover your POIs and make them visible in their applications, including training and grounding new AI assistants. Overture Places data already reaches billions of consumers today.
A common plug for the travel industry
For the travel industry, GERS provides a high-return value by solving ID and system chaos. Instead of building 100 different adapters for 100 different systems, everyone just uses the one GERS plug.
For hotels
- Consistent identity: Integrate once with GERS ensuring that every hotel property is represented correctly across listings, loyalty apps, mapping APIs, and partner integrations
- Reduce fragmentation: Hotel chains often have duplicate or stale property records across Google, Apple, and internal systems; GERS provides a stable anchor ID to tie all of them together
- Precise Co-location: Use GERS to distinguish entities at the same address (such as a hotel restaurant, a ballroom, or a casino) ensuring guests and delivery services can find the specific facility, not just the main property address
For car rental companies
- Interoperable locations: Every rental counter and parking lot can be tied to a GERS ID that aligns with airport terminals, hotels, and partner systems
- Multi-Partner linking: Automatically connect your rental sites to a partner airline’s terminal or a hotel’s pickup point without manual geocoding or brittle string matching
- Avoid proprietary lock-in: Most established POI IDs are proprietary; if you switch providers, you lose the linkages; GERS IDs are open, portable, and persistent
For airlines
- Integrated travel journey: Connect airports, lounges, gates, hotels, and rideshares through common, reliable IDs
- Unified travel graph: GERS enables you to link your loyalty partners’ locations (hotels, car rentals, restaurants) to your own systems consistently
- Enhanced personalization: Enable new trip-context services, such as: “Arriving at JFK Terminal 4 → show nearby lounge + partner hotel shuttle”
For cruise lines
- Seamless port-to-excursion: Link the ship’s berth to on-shore partner locations (GERS ID for a tour bus, restaurant, or hotel) to create reliable, bookable “trip graph” bundles
- Unified partner management: Ensure the “local tour operator in Rome” and the “shuttle bus provider in Athens” are all mapped to one consistent, reliable ID for your booking and loyalty systems
For rail operators
- Solving the “last mile”: Connect your stations to nearby hotels, car rental, and rideshare partners (their GERS IDs) to enable integrated, “door-to-door” journey planning
- Precise wayfinding: Go beyond just the station ID; Use GERS to differentiate main entrances, specific platforms, and partner pickup points, reducing confusion for travelers
For restaurants
- Discoverable in context: Make your location discoverable to AI agents, hotel concierges, and mapping apps as a “preferred partner” or “nearby attraction”
- Integrate with travel graph: Link your GERS ID to loyalty programs and hotel booking systems, making your restaurant a bookable part of a travel package, not just a random POI
For activities (e.g., tours, golf, spas)
- Link activity to location: Ensure the “Intro to Surfing” lesson or “10:00 AM Spa Package” is tied to a precise, non-ambiguous location with GERS ID, preventing booking errors
- Capture the full experience: Utilize GERS IDs for all key tour points (e.g. landmarks) so apps guide travelers through each viewpoint and stop
- Adapt to the real world: Use GERS IDs for seasonal paths and event-based spots so tours auto-adjust around closures and highlight temporary experiences
For travelers
- Unified reviews: Link reviews from every platform to a single GERS ID so travelers see the full picture
- Smarter discovery: Surface most relevant reviews to travelers or AI agents instantly, like “quiet rooms” or “great food,” instead of hunting across dozens of sites
- Trust & verification: Protect against booking scams and “hallucinated” listings with GERS acting as a grounding layer for AI agents, ensuring that the hotel or tour operator presented to the traveler is a verified, real-world entity with a validated location, rather than a fraudulent or non-existing link
The ROI of an open system
We are often asked how this makes money, or if the industry has committed.
GERS is enabler infrastructure, like a payment network. It directly saves integration and maintenance costs while enabling faster partner onboarding and new bundled products. Data management and conflation can cost 2-3X the cost of data licensing. GERS is designed to dramatically decrease that cost.
In the near future, GERS will establish a stable linkage between Places, Buildings, Addresses, and Roads. This ‘xGERS’ capability will allow systems to understand that a specific ‘Place’ is located inside a specific ‘Building,’ which is at a specific ‘Address’ connected to a ‘Road’. Example: By linking rental counters to specific building entrances or parking return gates (rather than a generic airport point), operators can reduce traveler confusion. This deep spatial context is essential for grounding LLMs and AI agents, enabling them to answer complex queries about co-located amenities and precise entrances.
The ROI is clear:
- Improved customer experience: Fewer location data errors mean fewer erroneous bookings, mis-directed pickups, and therefore fewer support calls and customer complaints
- Growth & new products: Common reference IDs enable new cross-brand experiences and “trip graph” bundles
- Operational Savings: 50%+ fewer engineering and data science hours spent maintaining and reconciling location tables and multiple map data sources
- Strategic Flexibility: Avoid vendor lock-in and improve your mapping API cost situation
This is why adoption is growing rapidly. Amazon, Esri, Meta, Microsoft, TomTom, Tripadvisor, and Uber have all moved or are moving to Overture and GERS. These companies are adopting Overture because open data and GERS allow them to build services that are not proprietary, captured by a single company.
An Ecosystem Ready to Support You
You don’t have to do this alone. A network of partners is already in place to help the industry adopt and build upon GERS:
- OpenTravel Alliance is handling the data extensions for travel distribution and is actively working with Overture to make GERS the new foundation for travel
- inHotel is leading partner engineering, data governance, and onboarding
- TomTom offers a GERS Onboarding Service and integrates its high-value proprietary data
- Esri is integrating Overture data into its ArcGIS platform, bringing GERS to the enterprise tools you already use
- Precisely is enriching GERS IDs with location intelligence for complex queries
Join us
The future of mapping is open, collaborative, and built together. We are looking for companies who want to drive the vision and build the future of GERS for travel together with us.
We have identified key vision projects (such as “xGERS” spatial linkage for AI grounding) and are seeking organizations to pilot and lead these initiatives. If you want to help define the standard rather than just follow it, come build this definitive open resource with us:
- Interested in collaborating? Join 40+ Overture members building GERS and open data together
- Interested in contributing data? Email us at info@overturemaps.org
- Interested in using GERS and the data? Check out our Explorer tool, data guides, and documentation
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