ISO 9468:2025, Tourism and related services—Online travel agency (OTA)—Guidelines for online accommodation booking platform services, and ISO 25639-1:2025, Exhibitions and events—Part 1: Vocabulary,were released recently, the development of which were led by China.

Adopted by many countries, ISO 9468:2025 and ISO 25639-1:2025 are important achievements in tourism standards with China’s contribution since the release of ISO 14785:2024 on tourist information services.

ISO 9468:2025 provides technical support for relevant services of online accommodation booking platforms, which will enhance the quality and transparency of tourism services and facilitate inbound trips. Through defining clear responsibilities, transparent information, standardized processes, strengthened security guarantees, and dispute resolution mechanisms, the standard systematically establishes a three-party trust mechanism among users, platforms and service providers. It further puts forward requirements on information security, financial security and privacy protection, to effectively safeguard consumers’ right to know and choose. In addition, it emphasizes the accessibility service function of OTAs, ensuring the smooth booking of people with special needs.

Catering to the prosperous development of digital economy and demands of fully implementing SDGs, ISO 25639-1:2025 focuses on the industrial development trends of innovation, coordination, and sustainability. The revised standard consists of 5 major categories and 94 terminologies, providing a unified and universal conceptual system for the global exhibition and event industry. It eliminates ambiguities and misunderstandings and facilitates international exchanges and cooperation.

The two international standards mark China’s contribution to the standardized, high-quality and sustainable development of the tourism industry. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism and SAMR will continuously promote the international standardization work in this field. While sharing China’s practices and cases, they will conduct analytical research on the feasibility of adopting international tourism standards to learn from international advanced experience.

Further efforts will be made to boost the coordinated development and improvement of tourism service management around the world, and propel the normative development and quality enhancement in the field of exhibitions and events.