The Importance of Standards in a Fragmented Industry

A Pax365 case study 

Standards often feel like an extra burden - another checklist, another set of constraints, another thing to comply with. But beneath that friction lies something essential: standards reduce chaos. They make industries safer, systems interoperable and innovation scalable.

Whether you're manufacturing electronics, writing software, or connecting reservation systems across the global travel ecosystem, standards provide a shared language that allows organisations to work together efficiently.

Why Standards Matter

A familiar example is CE marking within the EU. When a manufacturer places a CE mark on a product, it signals compliance with established health, safety and environmental protection requirements. While achieving certification takes work, the benefits are clear:

• Products can be sold across the EU single market without barriers

• Consumers and regulators can trust the product is safe and fit for purpose

• Manufacturers avoid costly rework, legal issues, and inconsistent quality

  
  

Standards create trust - and trust is what allows markets to scale.

Standards in Technology

The same principle applies in IT. Standards such as:

• OWASP (Open Worldwide Application Security Project), which improves application security practices 

• WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), which ensures digital content is accessible to people with disabilities 

  
  

These frameworks require time, investment, and discipline, but they ultimately reduce risk, improve quality and ensure that systems function reliably for the widest possible audience.  Compliance is rarely the easiest path, but it's almost always the most sustainable one. 

Our Challenge: Integrating Pax365 with the World

Within our own industry, we’ve seen firsthand the cost of a lack of standards. 

Over years of developing Pax365, our all-in-one tour operator software platform, we’ve built integrations with multiple large OTAs (online travel agencies) and reservation systems. Pax365 already includes:

• Entra ID integration for secure, role based staff access 

• Fleet and driver/guide management 

• Bus allocation, roster scheduling, and operational tooling 

• A growing ecosystem of APIs for B2B connectivity 

  
  

But there has been one persistent challenge: 

Every OTA and reservation system communicates using different data structures, different payload formats and different API expectations. Even when the underlying concepts are identical - availability, booking, pricing, product data - the shape of the data is different. 

Which means every integration requires bespoke engineering:

• Custom parsing 

• Custom mapping 

• Custom error handling 

• Custom business logic 

Multiply that across multiple partners and the cost becomes significant. 

This fragmentation slows down innovation for the entire industry.

Building Blocks: REST and the Value of Structure

Most developers (and hopefully all API developers) are aware and well versed with the REST (Representational State Transfer) standard. For those unversed, it is a defined and structured architectural style for designing networked applications. It uses HTTP operations to access and manipulate resources across networks. 

The introduction of REST enabled consistency, simplicity and scalability to how APIs are designed and consumed. APIs now became intuitive with API endpoints resources being exposed through well named and predictable URLs, along with the standard actions (verbs) of GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE. 

Add to that the introduction of Swagger, which is a means of providing human friendly documentation to REST APIs. It is built around the OpenAPI Specification, a standardised, machine‑readable format (JSON/YAML) that describes REST APIs consistently. 

These tools make APIs more intuitive, more discoverable and easier to consume. They have also helped us by allowing us to create our own REST API to expose Pax365 functionality in a well documented and easily understandable way. 

But while REST and OpenAPI help us create consistent interfaces, they don’t solve the sector specific problem of a standard communication framework for the tours and activities industry.

On the shoulder of Giants: Enter OCTO, A Common Language for Tours & Activities 

With the above comments on REST and documentation in mind, consider the following: 

The travel industry recognised this problem. In mid 2022, a new organisation - OCTO (Open Connectivity for Tours & Activities) - set out to create standards that would eliminate the integration pain many of us were experiencing. 

In OCTO’s own words: 

“The OCTO standards help operators, reservation technology companies, distributors, and everything in between to connect to each other easily and efficiently by providing an API specification that can be used as a template for new API connections or as an add‑on to an existing API.” 

This is exactly the type of shared structure the industry has been missing. 

What OCTO Means for Pax365

We’ve now completed a fully OCTO-compliant API that sits in front of Pax365 and exposes the core functionality common across all our previous integrations. 

The result? 

• The API is now well documented, predictable and adheres to a validated specification. 

• It has passed OCTO’s official validation tests and is fully certified. 

It replaces multiple custom built integrations with a single, scalable, standardised interface. 

This required investment - time, engineering and refinement - but the payoff is transformative.

Benefits of adopting OCTO 

• Massively reduced onboarding time for new OTAs and partners 

• Minimal additional coding required for future integrations 

• Less maintenance, fewer breakages and clearer versioning 

• Greater interoperability across the industry 

• A position of readiness for where the tours & activities ecosystem is heading 

  
  

In short, OCTO has allowed us to replace complexity with clarity. 

Why Standards Are Worth the Effort

Standards rarely emerge because they are easy. They emerge because everyone involved eventually realises the cost of inconsistency. 

The travel sector is finally moving toward a common language for connectivity, and adopting OCTO early positions is not just to keep pace, but to lead. 

By building our OCTO-compliant API now, we’ve created a foundation that: 

• simplifies the lives of partners 

• reduces long term technical debt 

• improves the reliability of the Pax365 platform 

• and sets us up for scalable growth  

Standards are the invisible scaffolding that keeps industries upright. And in a world where interoperability determines who can work with whom, standards are no longer just a technical preference - they’re a strategic advantage.