Throughout conversations at ITB 2026, a consistent, cross sector theme emerged and that is the strutural limitiations of legacy data infrastructure in meeting the demands of dynamic pricing, evolving distribution channels, and artificial intelligence integration.
NB: This is an article from Aggregate Intelligence, one of our Expert Partners
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After two days of discussions with revenue managers, pricing directors, and travel technology innovators, a clear picture emerged. Traditional approaches to business intelligence are increasingly misaligned with the pace and complexity of modern market conditions.
What follows is a synthesis of the core data challenges that customers and prospects across the industry are actively working to resolve in 2026.
From Scheduled Data Delivery to On-Demand Intelligence: The AI Readiness Gap
Across all sectors, one of the most widely discussed limitations was the continued reliance on scheduled, batch-based data delivery.
Revenue Management Systems (RMS) and Business Intelligence (BI) platforms drawing on internal data are now designed to refresh multiple times per day. Yet competitive intelligence feeds sourced externally frequently remain on once-daily delivery cycles, creating a meaningful lag between market conditions and decision-making inputs.
This gap has become particularly acute in 2026 as organisations across the industry move toward AI agent deployment.
When AI systems are provided with static, infrequently updated pricing data, their analytical outputs are correspondingly limited in reliability.
As a result, the industry is increasingly moving away from legacy batch-transfer approaches – such as static files delivered via cloud storage – toward:
- On-demand APIs
- Semantically structured data feeds
- Real-time competitive intelligence
These formats allow machine learning models to parse and interpret market data with greater precision.
Aviation: Distribution Fragmentation and the Ancillary Intelligence Gap
For years, airlines constructed their pricing strategies around fares filed through Global Distribution Systems (GDS).
At ITB, airline executives acknowledged that this approach no longer provides a complete picture of the competitive landscape.
The expansion of New Distribution Capability (NDC) and the growth of Low-Cost Carriers (LCCs) operating outside traditional GDS channels mean that filed fares frequently diverge from the prices customers actually encounter.
As a result, competitive monitoring relying solely on GDS data misses a meaningful share of market activity, including:
