"Personalization" has been a key buzzword and promise in corporate travel for years, but a frank assessment would show that progress has been slow compared with other industries.

"Other sectors are leaps and bounds ahead of where travel is," DataArt Solutions head of travel, transportation and hospitality Greg Abbott said at the Phocuswright conference last November. "We've got a ways to go before we get to personalization."

The lag in part is due to the nature of the industry. While people generally shop for groceries at least once per week—and shopping on Amazon is a daily habit for some—more than 80 percent of travelers take one trip per year, Travelport chief product and technology officer Tom Kershaw said in the same session. As such, past behavior alone generally does not produce enough data to truly personalize travel search and purchasing, making it necessary to use lookalike modeling and other forms of AI to fill in the gaps.

A concept known as the "self-sovereign identity" is being touted as one key to unlocking this challenge. In a broad sense, the concept is that every individual should have control of their own identity, having the ability to share whatever part of that data they wish as needed but not to have third parties storing that data in silos. That could be based in blockchain or other data structures.

Nick Price, who chairs the Hospitality and Travel Special Interest Group of the Decentralized Identity Foundation—which is working on developing the ecosystem for SSI—calls it "the most consequential technology of a generation." It provides "not only an identity for an individual, but for businesses or even things. This is foundational; it enables businesses to increase the fidelity of the information for their better customers."

Price has spoken a lot on what SSI could mean on the side of travel loyalty and services. One example is that if a traveler let a hotel see their data on stays beyond just those at their own hotel. They could see, for example, even if it was the guest's first time in a hotel that they had stayed in 50 other hotels that year and that they would be a valuable customer to court.

The implications could go much wider across the industry, in terms of the way personal identity and health information are presented when traveling internationally, for example.

Some of the elements of SSI can be seen in the EU's ongoing development of a digital identity wallet program, a mobile app in which users could store personal data of their own selection, such as personal identification documents, medical data and financial information. In December, the program announced a multi-country consortium working on delivering a cross-border payments pilot.

"This will give you the capability to start collecting travel credentials, storing them in the digital wallet and using them," Price said. "In fact, travel is one of the foundational vertical use cases for this digital ID through Europe, so that's potentially up to 450 million travelers that will have this capability."

Price also noted that numerous other projects related to digital decentralized identification are underway around the world and that he expects a "rapid pickup" from this year through the end of the decade.

Both Kershaw and Abbott also noted that the key for SSI to be successful will be making it seamless for the user. After all, the concept itself is not unique, but the ledger technology is what unlocks new possibilities, Abbott said. But the history already is there that if it requires a lot of work or a complicated process on the user side, it will limit participation.

"Users don't care; they don't opt into things," Kershaw said. "It's one of the fundamental flaws. Machines have to do that, because the user wants you to figure it out for them."