The proposal
A working group, not a procurement
Alongside the product there is a policy argument, and it is deliberately separate. Nothing here needs to be bought. What it needs is a table.
The opportunity
Online distribution is not a neutral pipe. It is a toll road, and the toll is collected offshore.
~93%
of online travel distribution in the United States sits with two companies — Expedia Group and Booking Holdings.
15–25%
commission taken on each reservation, leaving the local economy permanently and never recirculating in it.
10–20%
of every booking retained in-region instead, under a native channel the region owns and operates.
Today
A guest books a guesthouse in Samarkand through a foreign platform. Between 15% and 25% of that payment leaves the country. The guest relationship, the rate data and the demand signal leave with it.
The proposal
The same booking clears through a channel built and operated in the region. 10% to 20% of it stays. The operator keeps more, the traveller pays less, and the tax base grows on the same night's stay.
Why the window is now, and why it closes
Distribution is being rebuilt around AI agents. Within a few years a large share of travel booking will be initiated by software acting for the traveller, and those agents will book whatever inventory is machine-readable to them. That transition is the opening: a region that becomes discoverable and bookable directly, on open protocols, does not have to buy its way into an incumbent's network. It can be found on its own terms.
The same transition is the risk. If the region arrives late, it will simply re-rent the distribution stack of the 2000s for another twenty years, at the same rates, with the same terms — rate parity, guest-data gatekeeping, and the margin leaving each time.
Proposed scope
Four things would move this from an idea to something with substance.
- 01
Establish the baseline
Measure what the region actually pays today — commission outflow by market, by property class, and by season. The number has, to our knowledge, never been published for Central Asia.
- 02
Define an open distribution standard
Rate and inventory exchange that any regional property, from a Bukhara guesthouse to a Tashkent hotel, can publish to without an intermediary — and any booking agent can read.
- 03
Pilot one corridor
A single Silk Road route — Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva — is enough to demonstrate retained margin against a measured baseline.
- 04
Regionalise
What works for one country works better for five. A single Central Asian layer is far stronger than five national ones competing for the same traveller.
What is contributed
Sixteen years in this industry, and systems built at every level of the distribution chain — the property management layer where inventory originates, the booking layer where it is sold, and the distribution layer that connects the two. All three are built and operated against a real 200-unit property rather than a slide deck. That work goes to the group at no cost, and the resulting standard should be open rather than owned.
This may also make an interesting project for the USA–Uzbekistan Business Council — a cooperation story with measurable benefit on both sides, and one that is genuinely unusual: infrastructure the region owns outright, rather than access it rents.
Caravanserais were the Silk Road's original hospitality infrastructure — built by the region, owned by the region, and open to every traveller who arrived. The proposal is only that the digital equivalent be held the same way.