What If Profiles Were Event Streams?

Discover why the future of travel profiles lies in real-time event streams, not static databases. Explore use cases, scalability benefits, and how this shift can transform traveller experience.

Travel profiles have long been treated like digital filing cabinets with static records locked away in central databases. You update them, they sync (eventually), and life goes on.

But the world of travel isn’t static. It’s dynamic, fluid, and endlessly changing:

• 405 million business trips are made in the U.S. every year, creating over 1 million business travellers each day (travelperk.com).

• 6.3 million international business trips were made by UK employees in 2023 travelperk.com.

• 1.45 billion international tourists crossed borders in 2024 (en.wikipedia.org).

• One in six people has a disability, and 80% of those disabilities are invisible (adventure.com).

Every one of those travellers interacts with a web of systems from HR tools, TMCs, GDSs, airlines, hotels, loyalty programs, risk platforms, visa processors, and each system replicates their data. When something changes (a seat upgrade, a dietary restriction, a medical note), we hope every tool stays updated. Too often, they don’t.

Why Static Profiles Don’t Scale Anymore

Think of the sheer volume of data churn generated by a single trip. On a typical journey, a traveller might:

• Add or update a loyalty number.

• Change seats (once, twice, maybe three times).

• Modify a meal preference.

• Update an emergency contact or phone number.

• Revise travel dates due to a client meeting.

• Add a visa requirement or health clearance.

• Flag a special need, like wheelchair assistance or a medical device.

Multiply these updates by hundreds of millions of travellers, and you get billions of data changes every year, all of which have to be manually synced across different systems.

We know static profile systems can’t handle this scale. They miss updates, causing mis-bookings, loyalty leakage, compliance gaps, and last-minute scrambles. Travel managers and TMCs waste hours reconciling mismatched data. Travellers waste time re-entering information. Everyone loses.

Event Streams: A Better Model

What if a travel profile weren’t stored and copied across systems, but published as a stream of events? Almost the same as live football game on TV, you subscribe and watch live. Each update from a seat change, loyalty update, dietary flag, or passport renewal would be emitted as a real-time event with consent metadata. Systems would subscribe to these events rather than import bulky data dumps.

This approach mirrors how modern cloud infrastructure works:

• Every profile change is an event.
  When your seat changes from 14C to 14A, that’s an event with a timestamp and context.

• Systems subscribe.
  Your TMC, airline, hotel, and risk platform subscribe to the events relevant to their roles.

• Consent travels with data.
  Each event carries information about who it can be shared with (e.g., HR data stays within corporate systems).

• Nothing is lost.
  There’s no lagging sync job; events propagate instantly or queue if a subscriber is offline.

Why This Matters

Let’s run some rough math. If even 10% of U.S. business trips involve a simple seat change or loyalty update, that’s over 40 million events to propagate each year for just one country’s business travellers. Factor in millions of people with invisible medical needs or last-minute changes due to personal circumstances, and you quickly see the need for architecture that’s built for fluidity.

Add in:

• 1.45 billion leisure travellers crossing borders every year en.wikipedia.org.

• Over one billion people with non-visible disabilities adventure.com whose accommodations may need to be updated on the fly.

• An increase in last-minute bookings (TravelPerk notes that trips searched for within 6 days of departure now equal those searched 7–30 days ahead), meaning more dynamic changes and less time to fix them.

The volume of changes and the cost of getting them wrong become obvious. In a world where AI agents increasingly take over travel booking and management, real-time, verified context isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s table stakes.

Use Cases to Make It Real

1. Loyalty & Upgrades
   You reach a new tier mid-trip. Instead of being ignored for upgrades on the return leg, your status updates immediately, and the airline system uses your event to prioritise you.

2. Medical & Accessibility Needs
   You disclose a stoma bag or allergy before boarding. The information flows instantly to the airline and hotel without you having to re-explain at each touchpoint. Staff can prepare a private space or appropriate meals, and the knowledge stays discreet.

3. Corporate Duty of Care
   A traveller’s contact info changes while en route. Instead of being stuck in one system, every partner app, risk alerts, travel manager dashboards, and emergency responders get the update as soon as it’s published.

4. Approvals & Policy Enforcement
   The AI agent decides whether an upgrade fits policy only after checking the current profile events. A new cost centre? A newly added departmental limit? The agent sees them instantly and decides accordingly.

5. Cross-System Feedback Loops
   A cancellation triggers a chain of event updates: hotel, car rental, HR, and expense tracking apps are all notified. No manual emails. Everything is recorded with provenance.

Bringing It All Together

Travel is entering an era where content (Offers and Orders) and intelligence (AI agents) are becoming dynamic and localised. To support these, we need identity and context layers that are just as dynamic.

Event streams are the missing piece. They move us from “single sources of truth” (which are always out of sync) to “continuous truth” (where updates are everywhere at once). They unlock a travel stack where:

• Profiles are portable, not tied to any vendor.

• Updates are instant, not lost in batch jobs.

• Consent and context travel together, so data is used ethically.

• AI agents can orchestrate with confidence, not guess from outdated records.

The next wave of travel innovation won’t come from another search widget or booking interface. It will come from rebuilding the underlying infrastructure so that every system stays in tune with the traveller—event by event, moment by moment.

That’s the promise of profiles as event streams. And the sooner the industry embraces it, the sooner billions of trips can become smoother, safer, and far more personalised.

- Gee Mann - Travel Tech Optimist