As investors in the travel industry we often need to predict the future, or at least get some orientation around it.
Today this is particularly challenging, as the COVID pandemic is unpredictable and we still don’t know everything about it.
While we can’t conclude exactly what the future may hold, we can establish an overall trajectory and an overarching narrative that we refer to as a theme. Themes are provocative speculations on how change creates new organising patterns.
While they rarely come true in the fullest sense, they allow us recognize an emerging context.
For the travel sector we have identified three keys themes.
Contactless accessibility
In this scenario we see an acceleration of "no touch" automation across the supply chain and in particular in terminal buildings, kiosks, lounges, hotel receptions and lobbies.
Moments of crisis, like the current pandemic, feed on our insecurities and during such times we readily surrender our private lives and unilaterally give away our individual experiences in return for a safer existence.
Simon Nowroz - Disruptive X Emergent
The fulcrum of this scenario is focused on the use of blockchain tokens created at the time of booking.
The tokens will enable a next generation user interface that is omnipresent and responsive to verbal and non-verbal communication in which users will be able to enjoy haptic experiences.
Physical touch points will be effectively redundant by either moving them into the ether or onto propriety user devices like a smart phone.
This shift will require upstream effort to ensure the enabling infrastructure and networks are sufficiently deployed, and downstream innovation in areas underpinning an all-pervasive UI experience.
Innovation will show up in areas such as simplified workflows, ubiquitous connectivity, deep data integration and real time synchronized communications.
To deliver a brand experience firms will need to adopt an appropriate emotional tone-of-voice in this non-human environment and deliver micro plug-in modules for event driven moments like cancelations and seasonal peaks.
Think of this world as hyper connected and hyper automated but devoid of real human interaction.
Surveillance travel
Surveillance, as a trend, is well established with a sprawling global infrastructure of cameras, sensors and readers watching over billions of us on any given day, in any given moment.
Surveillance logic, repackaged as “smart” or “personalized” products, has already been successfully adopted across virtually every industry sector, and travel is no exception.
Moments of crisis, like the current pandemic, feed on our insecurities and during such times we readily surrender our private lives and unilaterally give away our individual experiences in return for a safer existence.
Capturing this experience data via the existing surveillance infrastructure and linking it via artificial intelligence to government agencies and private risk prevention firms would create a digital sphere designed to minimize risk through pre-emptive screening and decision-making.
From your initial destination query through to your return home you would be under a watchful, all knowing eye. Of course you won’t be the only one being watched.
The whole travel supply chain, with its long tail of suppliers and vendors, will also be monitored, vetted and certified in the surveillance sphere.
Here not there
Over the last eight weeks the world has conducted one of its largest experiments in travel: to suspend it.
The impact of restrictions from both the demand and supply side is unprecedented, and was unimaginable prior to March.
Hundreds of thousands of employees have been furloughed, aircraft parked up, ticket offices emptied and runways have fallen silent. How much of this is the new norm?
During the last two months businesses have relied heavily on three sets of interactions to remain productive:
- People-to-People
- People-to-Data
- Data-to-Data
With sufficient evidence we can now confidently conclude that all three sets of interactions worked despite being remote and distributed.
That is a testimony to our collective ingenuity and we all deserve a pat on the back. But here’s the rub – they all worked at scale, and that is something we didn’t know going into this experiment.
In the period since February we have seen augmented and virtual reality embedded into traditional video conferencing, significant improvements in streaming video and deeper integration of collaboration apps with traditional desktop programs.
Adoption of non in-person interaction is proving popular as firms adjust to asynchronous communication styles, and with continued rollout of the 5G network our capacity, both in terms of reach and richness, will grow exponentially.
In addition, People-to-Data and Data-to-Data exchanges performed well with no meaningful interruptions. Modern protocols and standards coupled with a robust infrastructure allowed us to function despite being scattered across massive geographies.
We have clearly compressed time and space from a technological perspective, the question is have we done the same from a psychological perspective.
The big question remains: How much activity will remain digital and much will revert to analogue?
Conclusion
The above themes will play out at varying speeds. All will experience some speed bumps, dead-ends and tail winds but the trick is to be open to the emerging and dominant narrative.
Remember, the details may change but the overarching pattern structure will be visible and that will prove to be the new norm, at least for a while.
But all of this only solves for today’s problem.
I take you back to January of this year and the Travel Technology Europe survey. It ranked the key challenges for the industry. Number one, ironically, was economic uncertainty but numbers two and three were sustainability related.
Whichever theme becomes the new operating environment it will need to be sympathetic to climate change or else we are just storing up for another rupture.