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| Illustration: White Light Media |
It’s the year 2024. You are travelling from Zurich to New York for a business meeting with a new client. Your Digital Travel Buddy sifts through all the data of your previous business trips to provide you with a tailored itinerary and book your travel. After checking in using your smart-watch, you arrive early at the airport to shop its virtual walls before a holographic staff member informs you that your flight is ready for boarding and guides you to the gate. There’s no line at security as the latest biometric software scans people from afar. On the flight, your seat becomes a virtual office and you have a quick meeting in 3D with a business colleague. Arriving in New York, your favourite music is playing when you check in to your hotel room. After a quick Vitamin C shower to recover from jetlag, you then leave for your meeting.
It may sound far-fetched, but Skyscanner’s vision for the future of travel is much more realistic than you would at first think. The global travel search engine recently collaborated with industry experts and futurologists on a report exploring how travel will become richer, easier and more intuitive within the next 10 years. As Director of B2B, Filip Filipov, explains, business travel will likewise be transformed by technology.
At Skyscanner, we think of ourselves as a tech company, rather than a travel company. For us, it was important to drive the conversation in the industry: what kind of technology will make travel easier in the future? How will travel evolve as we know it?
Economically, travel is more affordable than it has ever been and politically, we are seeing the reduction of visa restrictions as diplomatic relations warm up between historically disparate countries. But it’s technology that holds the real transformations for travel. Since Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007, there has been an explosion of tech that has led to us being more connected than ever before.
Travel discovery is currently very time-consuming as people spend hours comparing prices across multiple sites and platforms. Imagine having our own Digital Travel Buddy, powered by AI and living on a wearable device, that will act as a personal assistant and plan and book our travel for us. It will understand our individual preferences, organise itineraries and act as a tour guide. For these ‘e-agents’ to become a reality, it is a question of utilising existing technology such as Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana that already allows us to communicate with a machine.
The advent of touch screen technology has given rise to wearable devices that will only continue to evolve and become more mainstream. The Apple Watch can now be used to store your boarding pass and check in; in the 2020s, wearable devices will be smaller and faster. The equivalent of Google Glass in 2024, for example, could allow us to instantly translate foreign languages on menus. Travel companies may also use virtual reality to provide a showroom for travellers, so you can put on a headset and walk around a hotel or other location in real time.
This was feature I wrote for Reflect, the business magazine of Swiss-based financial Equatex. Launched last year, the magazine is a quarterly, 20-page broadsheet, consisting of five in-depth long-form features, all collaboratively written by White Light Media with an expert from a specific field. The world is awash with information and as a result, there is a growing demand for packages of carefully selected ‘brain food’ that people can dip into for relevant and intelligent content. As well as ghost-writing features, I edit and project manage the magazine.
Read the rest of the feature at www.equatex.com/en/article/the-future-of-business-travel/.
