Standards Are Built Together
ADAPT facilitates the development of agentic commerce distribution for the accommodation and hospitality industry — through consensus-driven working groups modeled on how the IETF, W3C, and OpenTravel build internet standards. Weekly virtual sessions, open participation, published deliverables. No gatekeepers.
What the Working Group Will Produce
Dispute Taxonomy
Categorization of all booking dispute types — cancellation, rate discrepancy, service failure, property damage, no-show, safety, and agent-specific disputes (hallucination, stale data).
Arbiter Certification
Standards for who can become an ADAPT-certified arbiter. Three tiers: Associate, Certified, and Master. Training curricula, examination criteria, and recertification requirements.
Resolution Protocol
The end-to-end process: filing → evidence submission → arbiter assignment → review → decision → settlement execution. Timeline SLAs by dispute severity (4hrs to 7 days).
Escrow Integration
How programmable settlement holds disputed funds in escrow, releases them on arbiter decision, and handles deposits, partial refunds, and multi-party splits automatically.
Fairness Score System
Public, algorithmic scoring of every arbiter — decision balance, satisfaction ratings, appeal rates, resolution speed. The accountability mechanism OTAs never had.
Guest Trust & Bonding
Anti-gaming mechanism: one-time guest trust deposit, Verified/Bonded badge system, and third-party bonding as a monetization layer. Prevents serial dispute abuse and Sybil attacks.
Decision Database
Anonymized, published case decisions creating a body of hospitality dispute case law — enabling consistency, training, and benchmarking across the network.
Localized, Certified Arbiters
ADAPT-DRP creates a new professional category: certified dispute resolution providers who bring local hospitality expertise and whose decisions execute automatically through programmable settlement. This is not centralized customer support — it's a distributed network of experts.
A ryokan dispute requires understanding of onsen customs, tatami room expectations, and Japanese hospitality norms
Consumer protection frameworks, riad renovation standards, and cultural norms around complaint resolution differ fundamentally
Local knowledge of event-weekend pricing, noise from Broadway, and boutique hotel standards in an emerging market
An open-source dispute resolution protocol that uses crowdsourced jurors and programmable settlement to adjudicate disputes. Operated by a French cooperative (SCIC), Kleros has resolved thousands of disputes across e-commerce, insurance, and freelancing platforms — with decisions enforced automatically through escrow.
Kleros demonstrates that decentralized, protocol-driven arbitration works at scale. ADAPT-DRP builds on this model by adding hospitality-specific expertise — localized arbiters who understand the difference between a legitimate service complaint and a guest gaming the system for a refund.
From Problem Statement to Published Standard
Foundation
Months 1–3- Kickoff: landscape survey of current dispute mechanisms
- Dispute taxonomy: categorize all booking dispute types
- Guest speaker: existing resolution models (OTA, chargeback, Airbnb)
- Problem Statement v0.1 published
- Protocol architecture: phases of a dispute (filing → evidence → review → decision → appeal)
- First Working Draft sections: filing standards, evidence requirements
- Working Draft v0.1 published for comment
Core Drafting
Months 4–6- Arbiter certification standards
- Resolution timeline SLAs by dispute severity
- Escrow mechanics: programmable settlement integration
- Compensation model for arbiters
- Geographic assignment algorithms
- Working Draft v0.5 — complete protocol
Refinement
Months 7–9- Committee Draft published — 30-day public comment period
- Edge cases: cross-border disputes, group bookings, property closures
- Appeal process specification
- Transparency requirements: anonymized decision database
- Implementation guide for PMS/booking engine vendors
- Revised Draft incorporating public comments
Ratification
Months 10–12- Pilot testing with early-adopter properties
- Final revisions based on pilot feedback
- ADAPT-DRP v1.0 submitted for ratification
- First arbiter certification cohort begins training
- Launch planning for seed markets
Weekly Virtual Sessions
Who We Need at the Table
The ideal anchor members. Flags gain jurisdictional control over their dispute mechanism, select their own preferred arbiters, and set variable commission structures within their Tourism Development Fund zones. Marriott, Hilton, IHG, Choice, Wyndham — each can tailor the protocol to their brand standards while participating in the open network.
Owners, GMs, and revenue managers who deal with disputes daily and stand to gain the most from fair, transparent resolution — ground truth
Voices ensuring the protocol is fair to guests, not just convenient for hotels
Destination Marketing Organizations are foundational partners — they champion both localized arbiters and AI-empowered travel advisors, designate Tourism Development Fund zones, and ensure commission structures reflect community priorities
The people who will implement this protocol — technical feasibility check
Experts in escrow mechanics, programmable settlement, and payment compliance
ADR professionals who understand cross-jurisdictional dispute resolution
Industry advisors like Hunter Hotel Advisors, CBRE Hotels, JLL Hotels, and HVS — the trusted experts hotel owners rely on to navigate distribution strategy. ADAPT gives them a new consulting vertical and keeps their clients ahead of the agentic shift.
Hotelbeds, WebBeds, RateHawk, and local event wholesalers — the intermediaries who aggregate inventory at scale. ADAPT makes them transparent intermediaries on programmable rails, with enforceable resale terms and rate leakage prevention built into the protocol.
Teams building travel AI agents who need standardized dispute handling
Listen to sessions, read all documents. Sign up with your name and email.
FreeSpeak, propose agenda items, submit draft text. Attend 1+ session per month.
FreeParticipate in consensus. Attend 2+ sessions per month. Nominated by peers.
FreeWhy Branded Flags Are the Ideal Partners
Major hotel brands already operate their own guest satisfaction programs, loyalty dispute processes, and brand standard enforcement. ADAPT doesn't replace these — it gives flags protocol-level control over how disputes are handled within their network, while participating in an open standard that benefits the entire industry.
Select and approve arbiters within your flag's territory. A Marriott in Nashville uses Marriott-approved arbiters who understand Marriott brand standards — not generic mediators.
Configure resolution workflows that match your brand's guest satisfaction philosophy. Luxury brands can set different escalation thresholds than select-service flags.
Set commission structures within Tourism Development Fund zones. A flag operating in a convention district can set different terms than the same flag in a resort corridor — reflecting local market dynamics.
Aggregate dispute data across all properties in your flag — identify systemic issues, benchmark against the network, and feed insights back into brand standards and training.
The incentive is alignment, not charity. Flags that participate early shape the standard to fit their operations. Flags that wait adopt a standard designed by others. The protocol will exist regardless — the question is whether your brand's needs are represented in it.
Sponsors & Volunteers
Working group infrastructure is lightweight — virtual meetings, shared documents, published standards. Annual costs are minimal. We need sponsors and volunteers to sustain the work.
$2,000–5,000/year. Logo on published standards, acknowledgment in documents, guaranteed Voting Member seat.
Ideal for: PMS vendors, booking engines, payment processors, hotel associations, tourism boards, hospitality technology companies.
Contribute your expertise and time. No financial commitment required. The standard is built by the people who show up every week.
Ideal for: hotel GMs, revenue managers, hospitality professors, consumer advocates, developers, arbitration professionals.
Bedbanks as Transparent Intermediaries
Bedbanks and wholesale room inventory companies serve a real economic function — aggregating inventory at scale, absorbing demand risk through pre-purchased room blocks, and connecting hotels to tour operators, airlines, and corporate travel desks. Hotelbeds alone contracts with over 300,000 properties. That aggregation power isn't going away. But the current system operates on opacity — and ADAPT can fix that without breaking the model.
Net rate contracts encoded as programmable settlement — permitted resale channels, maximum markup boundaries, and geographic restrictions enforced by protocol, not by lawyers after the fact.
When resale terms are machine-enforceable, rate leakage from wholesale channels into unauthorized OTA listings becomes a protocol violation — detectable and preventable in real time.
Pre-purchase 500 room-nights for CMA Fest across 10 properties, with terms on-protocol: auto-release unsold inventory 14 days out, DMO contribution encoded, AI agents discover bulk alongside direct.
Bedbank aggregated inventory — hundreds of thousands of properties, event blocks, packaged rates — discoverable by every AI agent on the protocol via standard MCP queries.
The blunt argument: ADAPT is building the rails that AI agents will use to discover and book accommodation. Bedbanks that participate will have their aggregated inventory discoverable by every AI agent on the protocol. Bedbanks that stay outside will watch their inventory become invisible to the fastest-growing booking channel in the industry. If you're going to intermediate, do it transparently and on open rails.
Hotel Advisors as the Bridge
Hotel owners don't adopt new distribution protocols by reading whitepapers — they listen to their advisors. The consulting and advisory firms that hotel owners already trust are the natural bridge between ADAPT's open protocols and the properties that need them most. These firms navigate the gatekept world of OTA contracts, franchise agreements, and digital distribution on behalf of asset owners every day. ADAPT gives them a new tool — and a new consulting vertical.
"ADAPT-readiness assessments" for hotel portfolios — evaluating distribution contracts, identifying OTA dependency, modeling the economics of direct AI-agent booking. Billable advisory work that didn't exist 12 months ago.
The advisory firms that understand agentic distribution first will be the ones hotel owners call when AI agents start shifting booking patterns. Being at the ADAPT table now means being the expert later.
These firms already negotiate OTA contracts, franchise agreements, and management deals. They understand onerous clauses — rate parity, last-room-availability, liquidated damages — better than anyone. ADAPT needs that expertise in protocol design.
Firms like Hunter Hotel Advisors run industry-defining conferences that convene hotel owners, operators, and investors. ADAPT's working group sessions can integrate with these existing industry gathering points.
Rather than competing with established industry conferences, ADAPT proposes to embed working group sessions within them — bringing the dispute resolution debate, the distribution agreement analysis, and the programmable settlement discussion to the rooms where hotel owners already gather. The Hunter Hotel Conference is a natural starting point — a conference built by hotel advisors, for hotel owners, in a format that welcomes the kind of structured debate ADAPT working groups produce.
Atlanta-based hotel advisory firm and organizers of the Hunter Hotel Conference — one of the most influential owner-focused events in US hospitality
Global hotel advisory covering transactions, valuations, and strategic consulting for institutional hotel owners
Investment sales, debt placement, and strategic advisory for hotel assets globally
The industry standard for hotel appraisals, feasibility studies, and market analysis — trusted by lenders and owners alike
Global hotel, tourism, and leisure consulting with 50+ offices — deep expertise in emerging markets and mixed-use projects
Hotel revenue analytics and distribution cost benchmarking — quantifies the true cost of each booking channel
The monetization is clear: every hotel portfolio that transitions from OTA-dependent distribution to ADAPT-ready protocols needs an advisor to guide the migration — contract renegotiation, PMS integration assessment, commission modeling, dispute resolution setup, and AI-agent discoverability audit. The firms at the ADAPT table today become the certified consultants tomorrow. Their clients stay ahead. Their practice area grows. The protocol gains credibility from advisors hotel owners already trust.
Property Management as Protocol Native
Every protocol in ADAPT — discovery, settlement, dispute resolution — converges at a single point: the property's management system. The PMS is where the guest journey becomes real. It knows the guest's history, manages the room assignment, controls building access, coordinates housekeeping, and processes the payment. If the PMS doesn't speak the protocol natively, nothing else matters.
The ADAPT pilot runs on a purpose-built hybrid PMS at The Exchange Building — a system designed from the ground up to manage four revenue modes (hotel, apartments, flex-stay, and rehabilitation units) across 200+ units and 19 floors, while natively speaking the ADAPT protocol stack.
This isn't a traditional PMS bolted onto a channel manager. It's a building operating system where guest profiles, room assignments, housekeeping workflows, access control (auto-provisioned PIN codes for every reservation), maintenance scheduling, night audit, revenue management, and OTA channel sync all operate through a single interface — and every transaction is publishable to the ADAPT network via MCP servers, REST APIs, and agentic markdown.
The goal is for this reference implementation to inform how other PMS vendors integrate with ADAPT — showing that a property management system can serve as both the operational backbone of a building and the protocol-native interface to the entire visitor economy marketplace: AI agents, bedbank wholesalers, localized arbiters, travel advisors, DMOs, and the programmable commerce layer beneath it all.
Future Working Groups
Guest Identity & Credentials
Portable, verifiable guest profiles that travel with the guest — not locked inside an OTA account. Privacy-preserving identity for seamless check-in.
Rate & Inventory Protocol
Standardized ARI (Availability, Rates, Inventory) publishing for MCP servers. Room type definitions, rate plan structures, restriction encoding.
Arbiter Certification Program
Develop training curricula, examination standards, and the fairness scoring algorithm for ADAPT-certified dispute resolution providers.
Join the First Session
The Dispute Resolution Working Group is forming now. No fees. No approval needed. Show up, contribute, shape the standard.