The Ministry of Tourism, Government of India, and Open Network for Digital Commerce today launched the National Digital Tourism Stack an open digital infrastructure initiative aimed at making more of India’s tourism ecosystem discoverable, trusted and digitally accessible, while enabling tourism to generate greater economic opportunity across the country.
The launch took place on the occasion of World Tourism Day 2026, in the presence of Shri Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, Hon’ble Union Minister of Tourism & Culture, Government of India.
Tourism is a significant engine of economic activity. It supports employment and livelihoods across hospitality, transport, food, retail, handicrafts, homestays, guiding services, attractions and thousands of small businesses embedded within local communities. According to official Ministry of Tourism data, India’s tourism sector contributed 5.22% to the national GDP and supported 8.46 crore jobs in 2023–24. Yet a significant part of India’s tourism supply, particularly smaller providers, local experiences and lesser-known destinations, remains fragmented across offline and digital channels.
For travellers, this fragmentation creates friction across discovery, trust, payments and identity-related requirements, particularly when dealing with unfamiliar providers or navigating multiple services across a journey. For tourism businesses, it limits access to wider digital demand and can require separate integrations across platforms.
The National Digital Tourism Stack is being developed to address these gaps by creating open digital infrastructure that connects destinations, homestays, guides, attractions, experiences, transport services and other tourism providers with travellers through multiple digital platforms.
Unlike another standalone tourism portal or marketplace, the Stack is being designed as open digital infrastructure. For tourism providers, it will enable a “list once, reach multiple platforms” model, allowing homestays, guides, attractions and operators to publish their offerings once and become discoverable across participating applications. This will help them reach wider digital demand without having to build their own digital presence or integrate separately with every platform. For travellers it will make their journey easy by connecting places, experiences, stays, routes and last-mile mobility through shared digital infrastructure.
Designed as AI-first digital infrastructure, the Stack will be built to support emerging models of travel discovery and planning, including AI-led interfaces and personal digital agents, while allowing the underlying ecosystem to evolve as technology and traveller behaviour change.
The Stack is designed around an ecosystem spanning more than 23,000 tourism experiences and homestays. More than 1,000 tourism experiences, including 170 ASI monuments and 29 museums, are already transacting on the ONDC Network, providing an existing foundation for the broader programme.
Shri Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, Hon’ble Union Minister of Tourism & Culture, Government of India, said, “Tourism is no longer just about visiting places; today’s travellers seek authentic experiences-local cuisine, local art, local traditions and meaningful connections that create memories, not merely photographs. The next phase of India’s tourism journey must ensure that growth reaches beyond popular destinations, creating opportunities for local communities, entrepreneurs, women and youth while making tourism more balanced, inclusive and sustainable. When we’re talking about this digital tourism stack, it’s definitely about technology first, but it’s the impact that it can create at the national level, is what we’re talking about. This is an AI native digital infrastructure for the tourism industry.”
Shri Bhuvnesh Kumar, Secretary, Ministry of Tourism & Culture, Government of India, stated, “Artificial Intelligence will be at the front end of the National Digital Tourism Stack, with the vision of ‘One ticket, One pass’ to bring together a traveller’s journey across India. Currently, flights, hotels, cabs, boat rides, or even an ‘aarti’ at a temple, etc., need to be booked through different websites. This fragmentation makes the process a digitally painful experience for a tourist planning to visit place. The National Digital Tourism Stack is a step towards bringing these services together through common digital infrastructure to enable a more seamless, connected and easy journey for travellers. The Ministry of Tourism will act as the catalyst for this initiative and work closely with States and Union Territories to curate and validate tourism experiences across the country. The project has been approved and we’ve reaching an understanding with ONDC. The ministry would be the catalyst and lead for this project. We will work with states and UTs to curate and validate experiences.”
Karthick Prabhu, Vice President, Travel, ONDC, said, “Tourism is fundamentally an ecosystem play, bringing together tourist destinations, stays, experiences, mobility, local businesses, platforms and government systems. ONDC’s National Digital Tourism Stack creates an opportunity to connect these participants through shared and open digital infrastructure rather than building them in silos. As travel discovery increasingly moves towards AI-led interfaces and personal digital agents, that infrastructure also needs to remain trusted and adaptable to new forms of traveller experience.”
A core principle of the Stack will be trust. The infrastructure is envisaged to support capabilities around provider credentials, reliable tourism information, service standards, ratings and reviews, grievance mechanisms and other trust frameworks that can evolve with the needs of travellers and the ecosystem.
The National Digital Tourism Stack forms part of ONDC’s broader approach of building open digital rails to address structural gaps in markets and enable new use cases as they emerge. Retail remains ONDC’s core mandate, with Logistics and Financial Services serving as key enablers for retail commerce, while Mobility, Transit and Travel extend the network into high-impact demand use cases. In Retail, ONDC’s DigiDukaan initiative has already onboarded 18,000+ retailers across Hyderabad, Jaipur and Mumbai for B2B procurement digitisation, while initiatives such as Amazing India are helping products from kisans, karigars and other micro-producers become e-commerce ready and reach wider markets. Across these initiatives, ONDC provides the common digital infrastructure that enables ecosystem participants to connect and transact; it does not operate as a marketplace or compete with the businesses and platforms using the Network.