Vacation Rental Protocol (VRP)

Vacation Rental Protocol (VRP) is an open protocol designed to enable host-domain signed vacation rental offers, allowing agents to verify that a stay offer originates from a host-owned domain. The protocol addresses the need for machine-verifiable, trustworthy vacation rental offers that include up-to-date availability, precise pricing, and a direct booking URL, without relying on a central issuer, registry, or accreditation authority. VRP is aimed at scenarios where agents or automated systems seek to confirm the authenticity and freshness of rental offers before quoting them, supporting independent verification and customizable trust policies.

Key features of VRP include the use of Ed25519 JWKS for key discovery and signature validation, ensuring that each offer is cryptographically signed by the host's domain. The protocol defines a process for fetching host discovery documents, resolving the domain's JWKS, and verifying the signed offer's integrity and contents. 0 and VC JOSE/COSE compact JWS, allowing for privacy-preserving trust history without designating any single operator as the authority. Additionally, VRP maintains a tamper-evident, append-only transparency log using RFC 6962 Merkle trees to record federation-signed tree heads, supporting independent verification of log entries.

The protocol is not a marketplace, booking intermediary, or ranking engine, and it does not function as a central trust authority. Instead, it acts as a verification layer that can interoperate with other protocols such as UCP for checkout and order lifecycle management, AP2 for payment mandates, MCP for future tool exposure, and A2A for agent-to-agent interactions. VRP is delivered as a specification (not a runtime tool), with reference implementations and conformance vectors available for independent testing. Implementers can generate an Ed25519 key, sign a verified stay offer, and publish the necessary files from their own domain without the need for registries or API keys.

0 license with a royalty-free patent non-assertion. HemmaBo serves as a reference implementation and standards contributor but does not act as a central authority or marketplace. The protocol is intended for developers, agents, and hosts seeking decentralized, verifiable vacation rental offer workflows.