With increasing usage of smart phones, computer pads/tablets, laptops and netbooks, retail consumers do not want to spent time searching multiple websites, making phone calls or emailing booking requests, but want, with a click of the mouse, to have access to a wide range of travel and tourism related products and services that is available through a global networks of reservation distribution systems and sales channels to make their travel planning easier.

The Open Distribution Alliance mission is to provide a community where like minded companies in tourism and travel software developers and businesses in the electronic distribution supply chain can work together to create an accepted structure for the free flow of reservation and payment data, between trading partner to trading partner enabling suppliers and distributors to use the same interoperability language, by using an 'Open Internet Distribution' platform.

An 'Open Internet Distribution' platform eliminates the restrictive barriers of proprietary reservation and distribution systems, by increasing the range of travel and tourism products and services to any retail points of sale whether it is a website, home based travel consultant or travel agencies, online travel agencies, online magazines, etc or other sales channels and distribution systems and networks like wholesalers, tour operators, aggregators, etc.

Open Distribution Alliance is open to  airlines, car rental firms, hotels, cruise lines, railways, leisure suppliers, service providers, tour operators, travel agencies, solutions providers, software developers, technology companies and distributors who believe in the concept of an 'Open Internet Distribution'.

Open Distribution Alliance is a not-for-profit trade association, founded in 2006 by travel and tourism related companies in New Zealand, with a primary focus on the creation of ideas and concepts to enable electronic message structures to facilitate communication between the disparate systems in the global travel industry.