India Builds a Booking Stack
India's new National Digital Tourism Stack aims to put 23,000 homestays and experiences on one open, AI-ready network by 2028. For DMCs and advisors, sourcing could get easier.
India wants its smallest tourism suppliers to be as bookable as its biggest hotels. On 27 September 2026, World Tourism Day, Union Tourism Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat launched the National Digital Tourism Stack at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi. It is a shared, open digital network meant to make homestays, guides, monuments, experiences and transport discoverable and bookable in one place. For DMCs and advisors who build India itineraries from dozens of small suppliers, it could eventually change how that sourcing works.
What it is
The stack is a piece of digital public infrastructure, in the same family as India’s UPI payments system and the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), which is building it with the Ministry of Tourism and the International Centre for DPI Innovation and Advancement (ICDIA). Suppliers list once on an open network, and any participating app or platform can show and sell them.
Tourism Secretary Bhuvnesh Kumar described the problem it targets. “Currently, flights, hotels, cabs, boat rides, or even an ‘aarti’ at a temple need separate bookings,” he said, as reported by ThePrint, calling it a “digitally painful experience.” He summed up the goal as “One ticket, One pass,” and said AI will be “at the front end of the project,” according to All India Radio News.
Timeline and scale
According to ThePrint:
- October to December 2026: preparation and development.
- January to June 2027: pilot, with the first batch of suppliers going live.
- July 2027 to December 2028: scale-out.
The target is about 23,000 listings by the end of 2028: roughly 14,000 experiences and 9,000 homestays.
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“Today’s travellers seek authentic experiences – local cuisine, local art, local traditions and meaningful connections,” Shekhawat said.
What it doesn’t fix
The stack addresses distribution only. Visas, air connectivity, safety perceptions, infrastructure and destination marketing, all of which shape India’s inbound numbers, sit outside it.
For advisors
- Nothing changes this season. The pilot doesn’t begin until January 2027. Keep booking through your India DMC.
- Ask your DMC about it. The early value is for ground handlers: verified homestays and village experiences in places they don’t yet cover. Ask whether they plan to source through it.
- Watch monument ticketing. If ASI monuments and museums become reliably bookable in one place, timed entry for private touring gets simpler.
- Watch the AI angle. An open, machine-readable supplier network is exactly what AI trip planners need. That cuts both ways for advisors who sell India.
Sources
Covers markets across the Middle East, Africa and Asia: demand, access and the policy shifts that move them.