OpenTravel Alliance, the travel industry's distribution specification and standards development organization, released the final 2010B message and business functionality schema, following the public review period.

"There are many changes going on in the travel industry, and we understand those changes have to be represented in the industry's standard messaging library for it to be relevant and useful," said Valyn Perini, executive director of OpenTravel. "From adding IATA's EMD data elements to airline messages to no-show fees in car rentals to a substantial increase in the number of messages for railways, OpenTravel is working hard to serve the needs of the industry."

The following new message specifications were evaluated and finalized, as indicated previously:

• Hotel Inventory Change Message: Facilitates streamlined hotel inventory availability transactions for trading partners that cache hotel rates and availability information from hotel suppliers. The messages are designed to alleviate two significant challenges faced by both hotel suppliers and their trading partners, which are out of synch caches and rising infrastructure/support costs associated with handling a high volume of availability transactions.

• Rail Schedule facilitates exchanging rail schedule information between a rail operator and trading partners.

• Rail Confirm Booking facilitates exchanging rail booking information between a rail operator and trading partners

• Rail Ignore Booking facilitates exchanging rail booking cancellation between a rail operator and trading partners

• Rail Payment facilitates payment for a rail reservation

As well as the following enhanced OpenTravel messages:

• Vehicle Rental No Show Fees facilitates a no show fee charged to a customer

• Electronic Miscellaneous Documents (EMD) for Air Messagesallows OpenTravel implementers to exchange fee-related information

• vaCharitable Donation Information in Air, Car and Hotel Booking Request support for micro-donations in OpenTravel Air, Car and Hotel booking request messages.

To access the full schema log-on tohttp://www.opentravel.org/Specifications.