What to expect from the travel industry in the future? According to inventors and futurologists, in a world changing with fantastic speed, you can expect the most incredible changes.
Infogroup “TOURPROM” and the company MUST2GO have conducted a special research forecasting tourism trends in the next century.
Flights into Space
A famous founder of the “Virgin Group” Richard Branson, who is developing technology for tourist flights into space, says that soon anyone (who has money) will be able to visit the space for two weeks. At the same time, he says, the main reason why this service is still not available, despite the huge number of applicants is its cost. In world history, there have already been tourist trips to space – for tens of millions of dollars in the early 2000s – to the station “Mir”.
“Virgin Galactic” flights will cost you $250,000 – it’s not cheap, but the amount is much smaller and more affordable, and according to Branson, in 10 years the price will fall to about $40,000. Richard Branson has also successfully launched the Virgin Hyperloop One ultra-vacuum trains, which will become fully operational in 2021.
As a result, tourists will be able to get from one city to another in just 35 minutes instead of the traditional 5 hours by this train. The next countries on this experiment will be the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
Fly On Rockets in the Atmosphere
Another notorious inventor, founder of “SpaceX” and “Tesla”, Elon Musk, announced in his social network that in the future, tourists should fly on rockets not only in space but also in the atmosphere, but at space speeds, competing with classic aircraft. In his post, he stated the following: “Hong Kong Singapore (2,500 km) – 22 minutes, Bangkok – Dubai (4,800 km) – 27 minutes, New York – Paris (3,600 km) – 30 minutes”. The principle of a land-based missile: tourists are taken by boat to a floating platform where the missile is placed, and from there they fly to the other side of the planet. In this case, Musk expects that the missiles will quickly become commonplace and the price of the flight will be the same as for an economy class ticket in the plane. More info about Elon Musk’s cool products, you could read in Pickvisa.com Travel Blog.
Internet Availability
Some experts have more grounded predictions. Thus, the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, believes that in the next 5 years, tourists will not have a question about a bad internet connection, even in the farthest corners of the planet. All this will be possible thanks to special drones on solar panels, which will provide an uninterrupted connection to the network.
Airports Will Become Mini-Cities
Gareth Williams, a co-founder of a major airline ticket company Skyscanner, promises tourists that the airports will soon become full-fledged mini-cities (or as he called them “air cities”), where tourists can not only drink coffee but also go to the cinema, gym, swimming pool or an exhibition. All checks and passport controls at airports will also be a thing of the past – instead, biometric technology with face recognition, integration with smartphone and electronic vouchers will replace them. When passing through the frame, tourists will no longer have to remove metal or any suspicious objects – a molecular scanner will examine them. Williams also promises full internet access onboard all the liners.
Robotization of Tourism
Today, there are already places where robots are taking over some of the human duties—for example, the Japanese hotel Henn-na. Here, the robot will meet you at the reception and help you arrange things. But technology has moved on. With the help of robot telepresence, you can “walk”, for example, on the Champs Elysees. The robot-traveller moves along with a given route rounds obstacles and is even able to communicate with others. Of course, it’s hard to call it a real journey, but it’s convenient to visit an exhibition or “wander” to your favourite places after work when you can’t do it in person. In the future, we may be able to rent a robot in any city in the world.
Tourism is ready for the “robot attack”. CEO of Unibot Dmitry Yatsunsky believes that support services, as such, will soon be unnecessary. And all because of the improved chatbots, which in the next 5-10 years will be able to replace the entire support staff fully. He is supported by a representative of the World Future Institute, James Canton, who also believes that help bots with the technology of searching patterns in the data and their intuitive processing will be able to put a reservation on hotels themselves. As a result, in four decades, travel agencies will be replaced by a digital avatar, Kanton states.
In hotels, people will be waiting for robotic butlers, and instead of a transfer on large buses, tourists will be taken to the hotels on flying pods. Moreover, with the help of 3D printers, which will be available in every hotel room, tourists will be able to print everything they forgot at home. If you are searching for more information about how travel will change in the future, check out Sonesta for more valuable resources about hotels, cruises and trends in the travel industry.
And while it all seems fantastic travel agents are “threatened” by online travel services. Thus, as stated the head of “Biletix” Alexander Sizintsev: “all the duties of a travel agent will very soon take over online travel services. With the development of technology, these systems have a much larger amount of information about tourists than the employees of travel agencies, so they will be able to select the most personalized travel. Also, the trend of the future will focus only on individual tours, so we can forget about packages.
Cryptocurrencies
The CEO of “MUST2GO” and the cryptocurrency bank “CrytoTravelBank” Maxim Zhadobin believes that tourism of the future will base on the active use of virtual assistants with artificial intelligence, cashless payments and even – payment in cryptocurrencies. In his opinion, the system will be able to convert CryptoTravelCoin into all currencies of the world. Since it will be done in a single ecosystem – tourists will not lose money on commissions. All this can be done through a simple application on the phone with a virtual online helper based on artificial intelligence.
According to scientists, in 30-50 years, it will be possible to talk about time travel, but so far we have to content ourselves with unique developments as close to reality as possible.
Augmented Reality
Augmented reality can fundamentally change the tourism industry. Instead of contemplating the ruins, it is more interesting for a traveller to see the walls of an ancient city, and instead of telling a guide about a historical event, to become a witness to it. It is very likely that soon we will be able to “travel through time”, at least virtually. For example, to see Peter the Great St. Petersburg in the times of Peter the Great, and then move to the Silver Age and visit Mozart’s performance.
Underwater Tourism
No, we are not talking about diving, but tourist submarines that will be used for group tours in the future. Such transport will allow tourists to dive to a certain depth and observe the life of the underwater world through the portholes. We cannot say that the technology is new, as there are already analogues used by researchers and entertainment companies. For example, the submarine “Sadko”, manufactured by the Central Design Bureau “Rubin”, which today drives vacationers off the coast of Larnaca.
Mobile Translator
People coming to Asia note that sometimes even in English, it is difficult to communicate with the locals. Mobile operator NTT DoCoMo wants to help tourists in this regard by working on a special program that will allow them to talk to people in any country via mobile phone. Simply put, experts want to create an interpreter to read the spoken word so that it can instantly translate the information into the desired language and play it back. If these and other technologies are brought to perfection and released to the masses, tourism will take on a new level. And we can enjoy travel more than ever before.
Orbit Tours
Coming back to the space travel, perhaps in the future, space travel will be available not only to millionaires. Orbit will have hotels for space tourists, and among the weekend tours, there will be flights to the moon. For those who cannot afford a space tour, there will be more affordable trips to the stratosphere. They will be launched by the American company World View Enterprises. There is no gravity there yet, but the tourist capsule will rise above the main layers of the atmosphere, from where you can see the black as in space, the starry sky and the roundness of the globe.
The world has already been acknowledged that the Japanese are going to build an elevator that will take you straight into the sky (sounds crazy, right?), and the Boeing Corporation – aircraft to send tourists to the vast outer space.
Face Recognition Technology
Face recognition technology, which has become a reality, fuels people’s hopes for digital passports in the near future. And many say that it will be much easier to pass passport control if you can use a tablet or smartphone rather than paper documents. But so far the bureaucracy is not going to give way to absolute digitalization, and it remains for us to sit and wait how long it will take to implement this useful novelty.
Of course, some ideas are perceived as pure fiction. But could our ancestors, chasing mammoths, assume that their descendants will build cities and communicate in messengers? Who knows what the future holds for us, the only thing is sure, it won’t be boring!
