DIF Welcomes Aven Hospitality as Associate Member to Advance Trusted, Interoperable Identity in Hospitality

Mar 25, 2026 — The Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF) welcomes Aven Hospitality as an Associate Member.

Aven provides the largest native hospitality transaction platform in the industry. Through their SynXis platform, Aven connects more than 35,000 hotels across 190+ countries with 600+ integrations, supporting both chains and independent properties. Providing travelers control over their data and personal preferences is foundational to delivering more personalized travel and hospitality experiences. As a member of DIF’s Hospitality & Travel Working Group, Aven will actively contribute to advancing decentralized identity in the travel and hospitality sector. Trust and interoperability are key to enabling seamless travel experiences. Aven is committed to supporting trustworthy, standards-based interactions for both people and AI agents across the travel and hospitality industry.

The appeal for decentralized identity to a hotel platform might seem counterintuitive, especially as many industries focus on “owning the customer”. However, Aven’s perspective is that customers are becoming more discerning about where they place their trust. Today, payments and discovery/recommendation platforms are increasingly commoditizing and disintermediating the guest relationship, undermining traditional patterns of earned customer loyalty, personalization, and trust. Agentic commerce threatens to worsen this dynamic, if the same platforms commoditizing hospitality become further entrenched by agentic capabilities along similar lines.

“At Aven Hospitality, we believe trusted, interoperable data exchange is key to the future of hospitality—enabling personalized, seamless, and privacy-preserving guest experiences through the secure sharing of verified information. Through DIF’s Hospitality & Travel Working Group, we are helping shape standards, schemas, and processes for secure, self-sovereign identity across the industry” said Amy Read, Vice President of Innovation at Aven Hospitality.

DIF’s Travel & Hospitality Working Group has developed schemas for a variety of use cases, and Aven’s participation represents an important sector of the hospitality industry, which is particularly concerned with privacy and respect for travelers.

“Hotels and resorts hold some of people’s most personal data about their leisure preferences, service requirements and sometimes even health concerns, said Grace Rachmany, Executive Director of DIF. “Everyone knows how complicated it is to get just the right hotel or flight or meal, and as we delegate this information to Agents, we need to carefully consider the standards we use for managing trust. Aven is a clear example of a company that puts service to their customers before everything else–their contribution to our working groups will be invaluable as we navigate these new technologies.”

Aven Hospitality’s involvement strengthens industry collaboration around decentralized identity use cases that can improve how traveler, service, and intermediary data is exchanged securely across the ecosystem.

To get involved with these user stories, DIF members can join the Hospitality & Travel Working Group for technical and semantic design and the Trusted AI Agents Working Group to develop standards and implementations for authorization and security in agentic systems. Both members and non-members can attend the Hospitality & Travel Special Interest Group for open discussions and presentations on industry trends.

For more information about DIF and its working groups,
visit identity.foundation