GERS: Global Property IDs for Hospitality and Travel

GERS is the Global Entity Reference System: an open, universal system of persistent identifiers for geospatial entities (places, buildings, roads, addresses) published by the Overture Maps Foundation. It is explicitly designed to be an open registry that makes joining datasets and onboarding data much simpler.

No. GERS covers all geospatial entities across industries - everything from buildings and roads to places used by automotive, logistics, urban planning, local search, and more. That broad scope is exactly what allows hotels, restaurants, golf courses and wellness centers to interoperate with car rental systems, mapping platforms, public administration datasets and many others.

Yes. The hospitality sector has seen multiple attempts and working groups across associations and projects to define hotel-specific identifiers, including work on unique hospitality identifiers and other registry efforts over many years. Those efforts document the problem and the need, but they do not negate the arrival of a global open standard like GERS.

GERS provides an open, maintained, and large-scale global reference that already assigns persistent IDs to billions of entities and supplies tooling to join data. When you have an open global backbone that covers hotels and everything around them, creating a separate, proprietary or industry-only registry duplicates work and fragments interoperability. The faster route is to adopt and interconnect with GERS.

Yes. Overture published GERS with documentation, tooling and bridge files that let organizations join their existing records to GERS IDs via a single-column join, which is exactly the practical onboarding pattern hotels and vendors need. That means hotel tech stacks can begin mapping to GERS immediately.

GERS already includes the core registry primitives: persistent IDs, changelogs, reference maps and bridge files for joinability. Many registry-management features (versioning, pointers, permissioned links) are planned to be implemented as layers that reference GERS IDs. Building a separate registry for functionality that can sit on top of GERS would create duplication rather than leveraging a global standard.

These are real operational needs: ownership relationships, sub-units and dynamic control do require identity, permissioning and temporal state management. But that does not require replacing a global ID system. Best practice is to reference GERS IDs as the canonical place identifier and layer hospitality-specific identity, ownership metadata, permission pointers and temporal state on top. That preserves global interoperability while solving hospitality complexity locally.

Yes. You can maintain an authoritative hotel registry or internal record and publish pointers that map that record to the GERS ID for the physical place. That keeps your control of the authoritative data while gaining universal joinability with all other datasets that use GERS. Overture explicitly supports bridge files and linking patterns for this purpose.

Yes. GERS is part of Overture’s open map data initiative and is released as open data with published documentation and datasets. That openness eliminates licensing friction and vendor lock-in that can arise from closed or paid registries.

Permissioning and privacy controls are orthogonal to the existence of a global ID. The right pattern is to use GERS as the neutral identifier while implementing access control, privacy-preserving pointers, authentication and consent at the layer that holds the sensitive data. That model avoids duplicating identifiers while keeping private data protected under your governance.

Yes, hospitality-focused projects can add value by building domain-specific metadata, permissions, and workflows that reference GERS IDs. The pragmatic approach is not to avoid GERS but to interconnect: publish pointers or records that resolve to GERS IDs. That keeps global interop intact while offering hospitality-specific features.

GERS provides a free, open backbone for identifiers and joining that any vendor or hotel can use. That means hotels and vendors have a no-cost path to global identifiers and can choose to build domain services on top of it without mandatory subscription lock-in to an industry-only identifier. The economic choice is significant: choose open commons plus optional value-added services, not forced dependency.

AI systems need deterministic identifiers to ground facts to the right real-world assets. GERS supplies persistent IDs and changelogs, making it easier to trace, audit and bind data to a place. That improves data retrieval accuracy, auditability and reduces the risk of AI making inconsistent or fraudulent inferences about properties.

Hospitality companies should map their internal property records to GERS IDs using Overture’s bridge files. For hospitality-specific needs, build a metadata layer that references GERS IDs rather than issuing an alternative global identifier. That gives immediate interoperability and keeps future integration costs low.

No. Generic, open primitives accelerate innovation by avoiding reinvention. Having a shared identifier for places lets many teams build complementary services without repeated reconciliation work. Hospitality innovation wins when you standardize the stable stuff and iterate quickly on the domain-specific layers above it.

Design it as a hospitality metadata and governance layer that references GERS IDs. Provide role-based access, verified authoritativeness and change notifications at that layer. That pattern secures hospitality needs while preserving universal joinability and preventing fragmentation.

Use a GERS ID from Overture Maps' Global Entity Reference System, an open worldwide registry of persistent place identifiers that works across mapping, distribution, payments, public datasets and AI pipelines; GERS IDs have already been assigned to a vast number of places, so in many cases your property already has one and you only need to look it up in the GERS dataset. You can self-serve with Overture’s datasets and documentation, have a developer join your records using GERS bridge files, or if you are an inHotel customer, inHotel will map and verify your property's existing GERS ID at no charge.

Yes. Most hotels already have one or more globally unique identifiers: GERS has preassigned IDs for a vast number of places, including bed and breakfasts, hotels, hostels, lodges, golf courses, guesthouses, motels, resorts, serviced apartments and many vacation rentals. Other global systems that likely include IDs for your property are Google Maps (Place IDs) and OpenStreetMap (OSM) IDs. GERS aggregates place data from multiple sources and is purpose-built as a free, open, universal place identifier that supports interoperability both inside and outside hospitality. You can discover your GERS ID in the Overture Maps Explorer (https://explore.overturemaps.org) or by using inHotel’s GERS discovery and management tools.

A hospitality-only registry fragments place identity and forces every partner into bespoke adapters, repeated reconciliation, prolonged testing, heavier support and audit work, and slow partner onboarding; those hidden integration costs are often very large over time. Custom registries also reduce composability: every new partner or service requires a fresh mapping project, increasing operational risk and blocking fast innovation across industries such as airlines and rail, ride sharing and taxis, car rental and EV charging networks, postal and courier delivery, logistics and freight, mapping and GIS providers, public sector and urban planning, payments and banking, insurance, real estate, tourism platforms and OTAs, telecom and IoT, and AI agent ecosystems. Luckily, that suboptimal approach is becoming obsolete as the world moves toward a shared, open place identifier: Overture Maps’ GERS provides a common backbone and the ecosystem momentum means many platform, data and public-sector partners are aligning on it. Smart hoteliers and hotel tech vendors should stop investing in isolated identifier projects and instead simply embrace GERS.