Every hotel deals with large amounts of data every day, such as prices, room availability and bookings. Travel portals would also like to be able to show this data to their potential customers. However, the software used by these companies does not always communicate with each other effectively, and “translating” takes time. That’s why 24 companies specialising in Alpine tourism (including our Tech Transfer Digital team) have joined forces and to create the AlpineBits Alliance. The project, which started eleven years ago, aims to use an interface standardised by the AlpineBits Alliance to enable software programmes to communicate with each other using a common language – you could see it as a sort of universal IT language.

One company that uses the AlpineBits standard is Apartment4.Holiday, which was created by several entrepreneurs from Val Gardena to help holiday rental owners promote and optimise their rental offers by improving their marketing strategies. The goal was to develop software that streamlines the workflow for handling apartment booking requests. In 2021 the company applied for funding from the Province of Bolzano and began research and development work with the support of our Tech Transfer Digital team. “We evaluated and reviewed what the company presented. We focused on the customer journey and the backend, and identified possible improvements to the programming language and the technologies used,” explains Patrick Ohnewein, Head of Tech Transfer Digital at NOI.

Apartment4.Holiday evaluated several versions of AlpineBits, working out their differences and identifying the best one for their needs. They field-tested the usefulness of the communication protocol and were able to standardise many connections, including those with various providers and individual listing portals. “After digitising the experience and offering virtual 3D tours to our customers, we wanted to make communications even more efficient. Through AlpineBits we discovered what I would describe as a universal translator that enables different software to communicate using a common language. This means our work is much faster and more efficient,” explains Hannes Senoner, CFO and co-founder of Apartment.4Holiday. He adds: “The work done by NOI is important because it confirmed what we thought, and offered timely, very concrete advice for what we needed.”

The project also received essential support from our Free Software Lab. Here, software developers, CIOs and CTOs test new solutions, develop software prototypes, set up digital R&D projects and experiment with new programming methods, with a particular focus on open technologies (Open Standard, Open Data and Free Open Source Software). For the AlpineBits project, the Free Software Lab team approached the Smart Data Factory of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (unibz), which conducts research connected to the standard, with the aim of creating a second standard for data from events and ski resorts. Professor Giancarlo Guizzardi, head of the Conceptual and Cognitive Modelling (CORE) research group of the Faculty of Computer Science at unibz, oversees all activity. He is joined by researchers Tiago Prince Sales and Claudenir Morais Fonseca. “The companies we support need visionary expertise to understand how to utilise data effectively without the risk of information loss. Professor Guizzardi’s team is an extremely important partner,” confirms Patrick Ohnewein.