Technology allows us to see the full pattern of air traffic globally. This map from 2009 shows incredibly dense networks throughout the populated parts of the Northern hemisphere. Much less dense in the southern hemisphere generally.
The densities will increase in both the north and south, because …
The commercial fleet of aircraft is expected to double in size over the 20-year period to 2032, with Asia and emerging markets leading the way. Cost of travel will be reduced, through increasing use of larger and more economical aircraft.
Certainly there is no shortage of effort going into the design of larger, more economical and more environmentally friendly aircraft. Taken to the extreme, …
Could this be the Leisure Travel Aircraft of 2050?
As air travel continues to increase rapidly, new hi-tech airports are being built to process large numbers of people efficiently, comfortably and securely – examples here are San Jose with hi-tech solar heating and ventilation systems and Munich, providing higher levels of customer service through state-of-the-art technology.
More innovation will be introduced into ground transport – for long journeys, a new generation of very high speed trains, based on hyper-loop and maglev technology;
For shorter journeys, driverless vehicles, shared use of cars and more personal public transport services will potentially transform travel in cities.
These are integral elements of smart cities, where new technology underlies every aspect of the way they function – as shown in this diagram, featuring one of Japan’s four pilot smart cities.
I am only scratching the surface of this subject in this presentation. Here are a couple of sources for more in-depth information.
The advent of public use of the Internet since the mid-1990s has had a profound impact on all aspects of society, not least travel and tourism. This slide shows the phases of evolution., on a graph with two axes – the number of ‘intelligent connections’ horizontally and the impact on business and society vertically. Of course, as the scale of connections increases, so too does its impact.
In travel and tourism, this has brought about huge changes in the way that consumers and business travellers make decisions, plan their travel, make their bookings and access information about services, attractions and destinations – and consequently the ways in which tourism businesses and destinations undertake their work.
We can see three distinct waves of activity, as shown on this slide.
I am not going to dwell on the story of the first two phases – we’ve all lived through them and they are summarised in the Technical Note for this conference. My focus now is on the Third Wave, the impact of which promises to be equally profound, enhancing the quality of the experience, as well as enabling new methods of marketing.
Here are some of the areas where major advances in technology and applications is anticipated over the next 5-10 years, with implications not only for communicating information and selling services, but also for enhancing the processes of travel and the quality of experiences at the destination. I am going to talk a little more about the first five of these.
In the Third Wave, increasing connections will open up the opportunities for new services in every aspect of business and life. These are being called Living Services.
They will “revolutionise the ability of brands and organisations to offer interesting and increasingly indispensable digital services to customers” with consistently high quality of service between sectors and brands.
Consumers will expect the variety and quality of services received whilst travelling to and within destinations to match up against those they receive at home – a key challenge for our industry.
The smartphone will become ever more important through all stages of the customer journey. The use of smartphones is now almost universal amongst international travellers.
They are being used increasingly during the course of the travel planning and booking process, in conjunction with other devices and offline media. This means that tourism authorities and businesses need to be telling a consistent story in a consistent style across different channels of communication.
Smart phones are being used by consumers even more during the trip itself and to the greatest extent after the trip, to remember their experiences and plan future trips.
All major companies in travel and tourism – TripAdvisor, airlines, train companies, hotel groups etc - are now actively encouraging their customers to use their app, as the basis for maintaining the customer relationship (and purchasing) throughout the customer journey. Destinations are generally slow on the uptake in this respect.
When travelling to and within the destination, people will increasingly use location based services. One way in which these will be made available or triggered