Corrective digital intermediation in tourism ecosystems: A conceptual framework for the growth of air passenger rights platforms beyond dynamic packaging
Keywords:
Air Passenger Rights, Corrective Intermediation, Digital Entrepreneurship, Digital Innovation, Platform Business ModelsAbstract
The digital transformation of tourism has been predominantly theorised through the lenses of online distribution, dynamic packaging and platform-mediated consumption, all of which concentrate analytical attention on the pre-travel phase of search, comparison, assembly and purchase. This paper addresses a parallel and under-theorised phenomenon: the rapid expansion of digital platforms whose value proposition activates only after the travel product has been bought and only when its delivery fails. Firms such as AirHelp, Flightright and AirAdvisor are frequently and imprecisely folded into narratives of tourism digitalisation, yet their growth cannot be explained by dynamic packaging or by any extension of distribution innovation. We argue that these firms constitute a distinct organisational form, which we term the corrective digital intermediary (CDI), and we develop a conceptual framework that locates this form outside the traditional tourism value chain. The framework decomposes the conditions that generate CDIs into four interacting layers (structural volatility, regulatory entitlement, an enforcement gap and platform scalability) and theorises their interaction through a sequence of testable propositions and hypotheses. We further offer an integrative review of four adjacent literatures (tourism distribution, air-transport economics, passenger-rights regulation and platform theory) and synthesise from it a four-type taxonomy of digital intermediaries distinguished by their temporal locus and their relationship to service performance. The framework reframes platform diversity in tourism ecosystems, clarifies why corrective platforms scale where individual enforcement fails, and yields implications for tourism governance, airline strategy and regulatory design. By separating pre-travel optimisation from post-travel correction, the paper contributes a more differentiated account of digital intermediation and platform-based entrepreneurship, identifying a distinct, regulation-driven category of digital venture and setting an agenda for its empirical examination.
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