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the future
of travel
2024
Planning & booking
presents
1
Introduction: A View of the Future	 3
1. Digital Travel Buddies	 12
2. Virtual Becomes Reality	 22
3. Semantic Search	 30
Conclusion	38
Appendix 1: A 2020s Travel Landscape	 40
Appendix 2: Methodology	 42
the future of travel:
planning & booking
3
It’s all bad news this morning on the 3D Apple
TV and the working day ahead threatens to be
long and taxing. With a wave of his hand, TOM
(Traveler of the Millennium) switches off the
gesture-controlled unit with a sigh. It’s clearly
time for a break.
Spring, 2024
Introduction:
2 The Future of Travel 2024 3
4 The Future of Travel 2024 5
After a run of 60-hour weeks, even his MeTube alerts are telling
him he needs to get away from it all. Siri, his virtual housemate,
has spotted the signs of burnout too.
Without any instructions from him, she begins to compile journey
possibilities that she knows he’ll love. “Perhaps a trip to see Africa’s
disappearing elephant herds? Only 20 years before they’re gone
for good,” she adds.
“Maybe something a bit more relaxing,” he replies.
“One of the new underwater hotels,” she suggests, lowering the lights,
filling the room with the sound of lapping waves on coral
and projecting a hologram of a gorgeous seascape viewed through
the panoramic windows of a room beneath the crystal-clear waters
of Fiji.
Over the next 20 minutes, Siri directs a virtual stream onto his third-
generation Glyph TV, a curated cascade of inspiring images, words,
sounds and prices calculated to get his travel juices flowing.
Finally, a stunning image of one of the
new space hotels in low orbit over the
heart-stoppingly beautiful blue-green
curvature of the Earth makes him sit up
and take notice. “Now we’re talking,”
he murmurs. “Book me a seat, Siri.”
6 The Future of Travel 2024 7
“Within five years, gadgets such as Google Glass will be
using these areas of technology and we’ll see a significant
change in how we handle foreign languages, or choose
what restaurant to eat at, based on the wisdom of crowds
that we can instantly access.”
“TOM is fictitious, but the technologies mentioned in the above scenario are either real, being tested
or undergoing prototype development,” says The Future Laboratory’s Co-founder Martin Raymond,
who collaborated on this report with Skyscanner.
Our research and expert interviews suggest that in 10 years’ time the era of time-consuming online
travel discovery, research and booking across multiple platforms and devices will be long gone.
As Skyscanner’s Head of B2B Filip Filipov says, “In the near future, there is going to be a mass-market
conversion to semantic, location-aware and Big Data [data sets that are beyond our reasonable abilities
to manage or comprehend so that more imaginative methods and ways to visualize them are required]
applications, which will be of transformative use to travelers.
It’s tempting to raise a skeptical eyebrow at forecasts about the impact of new and emerging
technology on the travel industry of the 2020s. Predicting which interfaces and devices will succeed –
and which will disappear without trace – is tricky.
8 The Future of Travel 2024 98 The Future of Travel 2024 9
“Ten years ago, who would have predicted that it would be the norm today to communicate directly
with all friends on vacation by Skype or mobile phone rather than sending a postcard, or make travel
choices from a website on a computer screen rather than from a travel agent’s brochure?” asks Filipov.
The explosion of the internet and its associated digital technologies since the turn of the century
has disrupted almost every field of human endeavor, and transformed the way that we plan,
book and experience travel.
Nevertheless, Filipov believes this technological revolution is in its infancy. “We are at the start
of a journey that will see personalization of content and advances in areas such as Artificial Intelligence
that will totally change once again the way we book and take our vacations,” he says.
This is the world that the Skyscanner’s Future of Travel
report explores as it reveals and explains the range
of technology being developed today that will evolve
to shape the global travel industry of tomorrow.
“Travel services such as Skyscanner will be able to deploy online semantic and intuitive tools that will
know your preferences: that you are a regular business traveler that you only ever take carry-on that
you always fly first class and like to stay in a four-star hotel no more than a mile from your meeting.
“Summer vacation booking will be similarly seamless, knowing that you prefer sunny destinations
with limited flying time, that you take at least two suitcases, and like a hotel with a gym close to a beach.
“By the middle of the next decade, travel websites will
be able to deliver personalized inspiration to the digital
technology in your home almost without being asked.
“Essentially, think of a world of travel where the traveler comes first – and the technology comes together
to make that experience intuitive, rich and inspirational.”
10 The Future of Travel 2024 1110 The Future of Travel 2024 11
A decade from today, all travelers will have at their disposal
a startling array of next-generation digital technologies that
will transform the discovery, planning and booking of their
next journey into a seamless and intuitive experience.
As Skyscanner’s CEO and Co-Founder Gareth Williams puts it, “Travel search and booking will be
as easy as buying a book on Amazon.”
In this first section of Skyscanner’s three-part Future of Travel report, we discover and dissect
the advances in wearable, intelligent technology, virtual reality and haptic websites – which take
advantage of a user’s touch to provide tactile feedback – and semantic search engines that our experts
and researchers predict will revolutionize the travel landscape of 2024.
12 The Future of Travel 2024 13
1.Digital
Travel
Buddies
12 The Future of Travel 2024
Long gone are the days when TOM (Traveler
of the Millennium) would have had to spend
hours online, tapping away on a computer
keyboard to compare flight, hotel and rental
car prices and various permutations on dozens
of different websites.
In the 2000s a range of comparison sites
emerged to ease the stress of travel planning
and booking, but by 2024, our traveler will
have a new friend to take the strain out of travel
discovery, search and booking: his Digital
Travel Buddy.
Global Futurist Daniel Burrus, author of
Technotrends: How to Use Technology
to Go Beyond Your Competition, best explains
the nature of the high-tech companion that
our traveler will have at his command.
It will essentially be an Artificial Intelligence
device, constantly connected to the web,
which has learned to intimately understand
our individual preferences.
“It could have the face, voice and personality
of our favorite actor or comedian and appear
to us as a 3D hologram image, or inside a virtual
environment, at our verbal command.
“It will personalize all of our travel experiences,
planning itineraries based on our particular likes
and dislikes, and act as a tour guide, telling us
only about the elements of the destination that
it knows we will be interested in.
“Travel brands will even be able to rent out
a personalized e-agent to their consumers
as part of the vacation package. Customers will
be able to continually engage and interact
with their travel company to fine-tune their trips
in real time and troubleshoot any problems
that arise.”
“In the 2020s, each of us
will have an individual
‘e-agent’ that goes
everywhere with us,
inside a watch or a small
piece of jewelry,” he says.
14 The Future of Travel 2024 15
The app can find relevant online travel reviews and comments based on its user’s past preferences
and searches. A traveler with a young family, for example, might be presented with a selection of reviews
of family-friendly hotels in his destination of choice.
Other technology brands are developing interactive devices that feel more like friends than machines.
South Korea-based Samsung’s SAMI interactive AI system will automatically monitor the lifestyle
and health needs of its user by plugging into the aggregated knowledge of the 1.5 trillion sensor-enabled
smartphones, wearable and other smart devices that will exist by 2020, according to project director
Luc Julia.
Mobile devices that can speak to us and understand our verbal replies, and even our facial expressions,
are also under development. Microsoft has Cortana, a voice-activated personal assistant that will act
as a human-sounding interface to all of the brand’s email and search functions.
“It will be deeply personalized, based on the advanced, almost magical intelligence in our cloud
that learns more and more over time about people and the world,” says Steve Ballmer, former CEO
and now Director of Microsoft.
TOM’s Digital Travel Buddy will have had
his origins in today’s emerging technologies.
Desti, a conversational travel app from SRI
International, the research institute that
developed Apple’s Siri system, is one of this
new breed. It is pointing the way towards
a world in which our mobile devices will learn
from their interactions with us.
16 The Future of Travel 2024 17
More importantly, by scanning our searches online, and cross-referencing our vacation, food, travel
and hotel searches it will use predictive algorithms to make original suggestions tailored to our price
range, peer and gender needs, and whether we usually prefer a fly-and-flop trip or a white-knuckle
adventure vacation.
The Future Laboratory Co-founder Martin Raymond says, “We’re used to Amazon and Google suggesting
products to us. Soon this kind of predictive software will be putting together detailed and tailored travel
experiences, like our own top-end digital travel broker.
“Drawing on the huge amounts of personal data we post about ourselves
on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Mixi, Sina Weibo, Cyworld,
Kaixin001, Orkut, Vine and Instagram, it will deliver intimate, personal
and surprising itineraries, with everything from exotic food trips to guides
to neighborhoods where you are most likely to meet like-minded people
who share your tastes in food, drink and socializing.”
Intel’s RealSense 3D camera is an example of the type
of technology that travel devices in the 2020s will use
to recognize and react to human emotions. The camera
is being designed to gauge the mood of its users by their
facial expression and body posture, and to understand
and respond to colloquial verbal commands.
The move towards the advent
of the Digital Travel Buddy
can be seen all around us.
Russian innovation brand
i-Free has designed an Artificial
Intelligence system that
processes a listener’s question
and supplies an appropriate
verbal answer in a split second
to enable its bio-robot Frank
to hold meaningful,
sequential conversations.
Facebook’s own Artificial Intelligence Unit, launched in October 2013, is working to create
an intelligent voice recognition system too. “The goal is to use new approaches to AI to help make sense
of all the content that people share so we can generate new insights about the world to answer people’s
questions,” says CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“In time, I think it will be possible to build services that are much more natural to interact with
and that can help solve many more problems than any existing technologies today,” he says.
16 The Future of Travel 2024 17
18 The Future of Travel 2024 19
As the software systems for a talking,
learning online entity converge to create
the “mind” of our traveler’s Digital Travel
Buddy in the early 2020s, so a range
of interconnected miniaturized hardware
will serve as its wearable “body.”
The first generation of such devices
is gaining market traction today.
Annual sales of wearable technology such
as wristwatches with smartphone functions,
including the Sony Smartwatch and
the Samsung Galaxy Gear, will hit 485
million by 2018, according to market
research company ABI Research.
Google will ship 6.6 million units a year
of Google Glass, the camera-enabled smart
glasses, by 2016, moving the technology into
the mass market, according to IMS Research.
By 2017, we will be using on-body devices
powered by microchips just seven
nanometers in length – the width of 15–20
atoms – that will “transform every area
of our lives,” according to Renée James,
President of Intel.
But in the 2020s,
wearable devices will
be far smaller and faster,
and with many more
capabilities, providing
the technology to make
the Digital Travel Buddy
a practical reality.
“The miniaturization of technology,” says
The Future Laboratory’s Martin Raymond,
“will open a whole new world of possibilities
as we combine wearable technology with
near invisible technology. Already, parents
are using trackers for their children when
they are traveling with them – phone devices
that tell you where they are geographically,
and increasingly, tags that can be embedded
in clothing, even inserted under the skin.
Add to that the possibility of retinal cameras
– cameras so small you can mount them
on a pair of glasses that won’t look anything
like Google Glass looks now. You won’t just
be able to track your child, you’ll be able
to see their vacation, or where they are,
from their point of view.”
Being able to see a destination from
someone else’s point of view is proving
popular in Melbourne, with their remote
control tourist. Here, tourists and special
tour guides wear camera-mounted helmets,
while their armchair equivalents sit at home
and suggest places they should walk
or cycle to. “While it’s not quite the same
thing,” says Raymond, “it gives you an idea
of how wearable and mounted technologies
will be used in the future.”
A next-generation smart watch, reportedly
being developed by Apple, could contain
3D holographic displays and web access,
placing streetscapes, a terrain schematic,
3D walk-through versions of a neighborhood,
or the fastest route through an airport
at our fingertips.
20 The Future of Travel 2024 21
Alistair Hann, Skyscanner’s Chief Technology Officer, predicts that the advent of the Digital Travel
Buddy will change not just the way that travelers plan and book, but their experience of the journey
itself too.
“Imagine wearing a device that is able to provide a simultaneous verbal translation of what your taxi
driver is saying to you in Chinese,” he says.
“Or a device that is able to translate your restaurant menu from Russian into English in seconds?
The possibilities of these technologies are endless. Suddenly, travel will hold no fears.”
Grand predictions are often made about the emergence of game-changing new technologies,
only for the date of their launch to move further into the future.
However, Dr. Ian Yeoman, Travel Futurologist and Associate Professor of Tourism Futures
at Victoria University of Wellington, is confident that advanced wearable devices will become
part of the mainstream by the end of the decade.
“Developments such as Google Glass will be mainstream within 18 months. Within five years,
everything that Google Glass can do now will be available on a contact lens,” he says.
And the trend for mobile device miniaturization will gain
momentum as current advances such as microscopic
bendable circuits developed by the Swiss Federal Institute
of Technology – 1/60th the thickness of a human hair
and implantable on a contact lens – will hit the mass market
by the end of this decade. All will make it easier to access
and indeed to carry so-called wearable or bodyTECH,
which some of our experts are now referring to as buddyTech.
22 The Future of Travel 2024 23
2.Virtual
Becomes
a Reality His wearable AI connects online with a new
generation of “try before you buy” websites
operated by travel brands. It returns with
a palette of virtual reality samples that allow
our traveler to see the sights, hear the sounds,
and even feel the landscape, of a variety
of different travel experiences.
His sense of anticipation and excitement will
be piqued by a 3D, multi-sensory stroll along
a sun-drenched Costa Rican shore, a trek
along a snow-covered path high in the Andes
or a dive on the Barrier Reef.
A simple verbal command sets TOM off on a journey of travel
discovery from the comfort of his own bed. “I really need a
vacation,” he murmurs, sending his Digital Travel Buddy into
action on his behalf.
22 The Future of Travel 2024 23
24 The Future of Travel 2024 25
“Virtual reality won’t replace real travel, as is often portrayed in sci-fi movies,” says Technology
Futurist Daniel Burrus.
Resembling a set of ski goggles, the headset combines
smartphone technology and motion sensors to produce
an experience similar to watching a never-ending IMAX
screen. In essence, images are projected onto the retina
in much the same way as old-style projectors throw
images onto a screen.
24 The Future of Travel 2024 25
Another virtual reality headset, designed by a team at Vienna University of Technology, allows a user
seemingly to walk through an endless labyrinth while really walking around in circles in a small room.
The researchers are now adding motion and proximity-sensing technology that will enable more
than one person to experience the same labyrinth at the same time without bumping into each other,
according to New Scientist magazine.
In 2014, the technology to make this future vision a reality is already beginning to emerge. A CGI tool
developed by technology brand 3RD Planet enables users to take an amazingly realistic walk through
the streets of a city.
A research team from the University of North Carolina have engineered a virtual reality recreation
of a crowd scene outside St Paul’s Cathedral in London in 1622 that allows visitors to change
viewpoints at will.
The new Oculus Rift VR headset from US start-up Oculus VR is the predecessor of the virtual reality
devices that our traveler will deploy in his home as he samples a range of vacation scenarios in 3D.
“It will become a new form of show rooming, an incredible
3D taste of a destination that will make travelers long to
experience the real thing.”
26 The Future of Travel 2024 27
Other advances will add a further layer of sensation
to the virtual reality experience: the sense of touch
through haptic technologies.
Disney has created a new interface called REVEL that gives tactile feedback through
minute vibrations from virtual 3D objects. The system will enable users to feel the craters
on the Moon, the spines of a cactus or the outlines of a delicate object. Japan’s NHK
public broadcast network is now prototyping a similar system that enables viewers
to “feel” the surfaces and textures of objects viewed on screen, including sand,
sea and foliage. Meanwhile, at Japan’s Tachi Lab, researcher Masashi Nakatani
is working on the haptic TECHTILE toolkit, a device that will enable you to convert
sounds into textures and surfaces that you can feel.
“Imagine being able to feel the heat of the sun on your hand,” says The Future
Laboratory’s Martin Raymond. “With software like the TECHTILE, which converts
sound waves to tactile feelings, you will be able to feel the sound of a gamelan in Bali,
or touch fluttering prayer flags in Tibet or Bhutan.”
By 2020, similar vibration-based haptic techniques will enable shoppers to feel
the texture of the wool, silk or cotton of the item they are about to buy on their tablet,
according to Robyn Schwartz, Associate Director of IBM Research Retail Analytics.
By the next decade, travelers will be able to use similar technology to feel the sand
between their toes on a beach thousands of miles away.
28 The Future of Travel 2024 2928 The Future of Travel 2024 29
“In 10 years’ time, a traveler will be able
to take a virtual reality walk through
the hotel he is planning to book in real
time,” says Nik Gupta, Director of Hotels
at Skyscanner.
‘He will be able to watch staff preparing
his room as it happens, see the staff
in action and watch chefs cooking
his favorite food. That will be ground-
breaking – an incredibly powerful tool
for building engagement and trust
between the traveler and the brand.”
TOM’s relaxed and exciting virtual reality
tour through a series of very different
travel scenarios allows him to fine-tune
his desires. He now knows whether he
would prefer a city break to a mountain
walking adventure or a trip to an exotic
beach idyll.
Reacting instantly to his decision,
his Digital Travel Buddy sets off on the
next stage of discovery: actively seeking,
and finally planning and booking, his trip
of choice.
30 The Future of Travel 2024 31
3.Semantic
Search
TOM’s next stage of engagement
is with the powerfully intuitive
and semantic search tools that will
be deployed online by the leading
travel brands of the next decade.
30 The Future of Travel 2024 31
32 The Future of Travel 2024 33
Connected to him via his Digital Travel Buddy, which communicates hyper-personalized preferences
from his favorite breakfast food to his gym regime and the stitch count of the cotton sheets on his bed,
he uses gestures and voice commands to interact as the tools engage Big Data analytics to compile
a selection of ideal vacation packages.
It is a one-stop-shop experience with every aspect of his journey researched, considered and booked.
As Stefan Rust, CEO of Exicon, says, “In the near future it is likely that all-encompassing mobile apps
will provide a thorough, end-to-end service – aggregates of airlines, airports, hotels and ground transport
systems will provide the tools for every part of the experience.
“Before your flight, the technology will enable you to research and book your flight and arrange
your local travel. At the airport it will guide you through the terminal, tell you where to check in,
track your luggage, exchange your currency and let you plan your arrival, book a room and rent a car,
as well as providing you with all the information you will need when you get to your destination.”
Technology and online brands are swiftly developing intuitive new approaches to searching
in cyberspace. Users will come to expect their preferences and previous search filters to be saved,
even allowing brands to access their social media networks, search history, even email strands more
proactively so that they can develop intimate, comprehensive cartograms of their needs,
likes and possible future behavior.
34 The Future of Travel 2024 35
Margaret Rice-Jones, Chairman of Skyscanner, believes this technology
will enable travel brands to more effectively use a person’s social media
presence, or even advice from their peer-to-peer networks,
to more accurately and imaginatively suggest future travel options.
“In the near future, we will see more integration across travel sites
and social media sites,” she says.
Tech firm Affectiva is creating a facial coding algorithm that will enable
search engine software to read human expressions and thereby judge
whether the results it is providing are pleasing or frustrating the user.
New personal discovery engine Nara uses neuroscience concepts
to mimic and understand the thought patterns of the human brain,
allowing it to build a “digital DNA” of a user’s likes and dislikes.
Facebook’s Graph Search answers questions in colloquial – and even
grammatically incorrect English – and makes intuitive suggestions
drawing on peer-to-peer social media data.
Increasingly, these tools will automatically trawl the huge amount
of personal customer data at their disposal to instantly ensure that
travel search results conform to an individual user’s demands and desires.
By 2024 this intuitive approach will be developed
further, with software able to read facial expressions
or build a digital DNA of user preferences.
34 The Future of Travel 2024 35
36 The Future of Travel 2024 37
“Big Data can be a powerful force in transforming the travel industry,” according to the Amadeus IT
Group. “It could be one of the most influential initiatives since the online reservation system.”
Not everyone agrees. Technology insiders, such as Betsy Bilhorn, Vice-President of Product Management
at Scribe Software, dismiss it as over-hyped and likely to cause confusion through information overload
rather than provide a holistic view of customers’ needs.
However The Future Laboratory’s Martin Raymond highlights that “As well as technology influencing
technology, how we develop technology is hugely influenced by the consumer.”
“In our research with Generation I (Generation Interactive) pre-teens, and their older brothers and sisters
that we dubbed Generation D (Digital), we discovered that few of them fear the arrival of Big Friendly
Data, as we call it, while more of them welcome it, provided it brings them closer to what they want –
seamless communications with the world around them.”
As Travel Futurologist Dr. Ian Yeoman says, “Our young children will think that it is completely natural
to talk to a machine that understands them without tapping a keyboard or touching a screen.
“Speech recognition involving smart agents that can use natural language and learn from experience
is already becoming more mainstream.”
Within minutes, TOM’s wearable AI will present him with a selection of door-to-door tailored travel
packages to browse through.
Once he has made his choice, his Digital Travel Buddy will make all of the bookings – and manage
payment transactions – by liaising with a travel brand’s intelligent software system.
That will be travel discovery in 2024. A trip sampled, researched and booked intuitively and seamlessly
in less than an hour – without ever leaving the house.
It is a world that will seem perfectly normal to our traveler. Martin Raymond concludes, “Current travelers
and users are wary of online systems having this level of in-depth understanding of their thoughts
and feelings.
“But teenagers and the under-10s are puzzled about why people are so worried. They expect technology
to work intuitively, to offer them solutions as they need them without ever being directly asked to do so.”
By 2024, TOM will take it for granted that a whole
series of online software search entities will talk
to him and gauge his reactions and emotions
as they seek to anticipate his travel needs.
38 The Future of Travel 2024 39
Conclusion
TOM’s booking and planning experience will be incredibly
seamless, collaborative, bespoke and immersive.
38 The Future of Travel 2024 39
A Digital Travel Buddy, a wearable Artificial Intelligence device
incorporating the latest voice- and gesture-control technology,
will intuitively sift through the online information overload to provide
him with the tailored trip of his dreams.
Travel discovery will be enhanced by brand websites that deploy
next-generation virtual reality and haptic tools to enable our traveler
to see, hear and feel a series of possible destinations from the comfort
of his own home.
Booking will be a quick, easy, stress-free and one-stop experience
conducted through semantic websites that are capable of learning
the likes and dislikes of a customer from his previous online actions,
and of conversing with them verbally in everyday language.
40 The Future of Travel 2024 41
The financial ebullience of the blossoming markets will be a necessary global antidote to the continuing
economic turbulence that will shape the attitude of travelers in the pruned markets – the economies in
Europe and the US whose growth has been cut back in the past 5 years by post-crash debt and austerity.
As IPK International’s Global Travel Trends report 2012/2013 says, “An increasing number of these
countries are not able to pay their debts, the debt crisis has not reached its end and the resulting
negative impacts on travel behavior – so-called ‘downward mobility’ – in Western Europe, the United
States and Japan cannot be excluded.”
The final factor that will help to define the global travel industry of the 2020s is a social one.
A demographic time bomb is waiting in the wings as the world’s population ages at an unprecedented
rate.
The past century has witnessed the most rapid decline in mortality rates in human history with life
expectancy for the world as a whole rising from 47 years in 1950–55 to 69 years in 2005–2010, according
to the UN.
In 1950, there were twice as many children under 15 as adults over 60. By 2050, the 60+ group will
outnumber children by two to one.
So, in 2024, our traveler will make his journey in a world in which blossoming market demand for new
experiences is counter-balanced by the financial caution of the still-recovering pruned markets of Europe
and the United States.
And he will take it as a given that every aspect of travel, from discovery and booking to transit and flying,
will incorporate the latest digital technology in the way that he does – seamlessly and unselfconsciously.
Appendix 1:
A 2020s Travel Landscape
To understand our 2020s traveler’s journey, we need to consider the technological, economic and
social forces that will reshape the global travel industry over the next 10 years.
Perhaps the most far-reaching factor at work is the growth towards digital maturity. In 2014, cyberspace
and its associated technologies are no longer as novel and surprising. They are becoming the backdrop
to all of our lives.
In China, 464 million people, or 34.5 percent of the total population, now access the internet through
smartphones or wireless mobile devices, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.
Asia will see the biggest growth in the middle class – predicted to triple to 1.7 billion by 2020, according
to Brookings Institution – whose spending power will drive new global behavior and attitudes to digital
technology.
By 2024, internet connectivity – and the mobile devices that enable it – will be as unremarkable as
electric lighting and central heating are today. The technology will be seamlessly enmeshed in the day-
to-day world of travelers in both the developed and developing economies. According to Cisco Systems,
there will be 50 billion devices connected to the internet by 2020.
Simultaneously, there will be an explosion of travel from the blossoming markets of Asia, South America
and Africa – the new emerging economies of each region – as their consumer spending power increases
enormously.
By 2030, Asia, the world’s largest and fastest-growing regional economy, will double its GDP to $67
trillion, outstripping GDP projections for Europe and the Americas combined, according to the Boston
Consulting Group.
Traveling millions from the blossoming markets are ushering in an era of global mobility, with the global
travel industry – and therefore demand for travel opportunities and experiences – expanding rapidly in
the next decade.
The World Travel & Tourism Council forecast 3.2 percent growth in global travel in 2013, easily
outstripping the predicted 2.4 percent growth in global GDP. The gap was even more pronounced in the
emerging economies in 2012, where China and South Africa posted 7 percent annual travel growth and
Indonesia reported a 6 percent rise.
40 The Future of Travel 2024 41
42 The Future of Travel 2024
Appendix 2:
Research methodology
This Skyscanner report is the work of a team of 56 editors, researchers and futures networkers,
across key international cities. This team built a detailed picture of the next 10 years, looking at how
breakthrough technologies and exciting new destinations will shape the global travel industry in the
2020s.
The experts
We explored the travel technologies and behaviors to come, by plugging into the know-how of a range
of world-renowned experts, including Futurist Daniel Burrus, author of Technotrends: How to Use
Technology to Go Beyond Your Competition, and Travel Futurologist Dr. Ian Yeoman.
We also drew on the background lessons provided by digital strategist Daljit Singh; Microsoft’s UK Chief
Envisioning Officer Dave Coplin; Google Creative Lab Executive Creative Director Steve Vranakis; Kevin
Warwick, Professor of Cybernetics at Reading University; and Martin Raymond, Co-founder of The Future
Laboratory and author of CreATE, The Tomorrow People, and The Trend Forecaster’s Handbook.
From Skyscanner, the following experts were called on for their insights, expertise, and where possible,
quoted directly in the report: Margaret Rice-Jones, Chairman; Gareth Williams, CEO and Co-Founder;
Alistair Hann, CTO; Filip Filipov, Head of B2B; Nik Gupta, Director of Hotels; and Dug Campbell, Product
Marketing Manager.
In tandem with the above, we used The Future Laboratory’s online network, LS:N Global, to supplement
research, as well as findings from The Future Laboratory’s annual series of Futures reports on travel,
technology, food and hospitality.
42 The Future of Travel 2024
www.skyscanner2024.com
Contact us
For further information regarding this report please contact:
Randi Wolfson, Skyscanner – randi.wolfson@skyscanner.com / 305-967-6304
or
Meagan Soffera, Access Communications – msoffera@accesspr.com / 980-236-7934
For more information on Skyscanner visit www.skyscanner.com

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Future of travel 2024 part1

  • 2.
  • 3. 1 Introduction: A View of the Future 3 1. Digital Travel Buddies 12 2. Virtual Becomes Reality 22 3. Semantic Search 30 Conclusion 38 Appendix 1: A 2020s Travel Landscape 40 Appendix 2: Methodology 42 the future of travel: planning & booking
  • 4. 3 It’s all bad news this morning on the 3D Apple TV and the working day ahead threatens to be long and taxing. With a wave of his hand, TOM (Traveler of the Millennium) switches off the gesture-controlled unit with a sigh. It’s clearly time for a break. Spring, 2024 Introduction: 2 The Future of Travel 2024 3
  • 5. 4 The Future of Travel 2024 5 After a run of 60-hour weeks, even his MeTube alerts are telling him he needs to get away from it all. Siri, his virtual housemate, has spotted the signs of burnout too. Without any instructions from him, she begins to compile journey possibilities that she knows he’ll love. “Perhaps a trip to see Africa’s disappearing elephant herds? Only 20 years before they’re gone for good,” she adds. “Maybe something a bit more relaxing,” he replies. “One of the new underwater hotels,” she suggests, lowering the lights, filling the room with the sound of lapping waves on coral and projecting a hologram of a gorgeous seascape viewed through the panoramic windows of a room beneath the crystal-clear waters of Fiji. Over the next 20 minutes, Siri directs a virtual stream onto his third- generation Glyph TV, a curated cascade of inspiring images, words, sounds and prices calculated to get his travel juices flowing. Finally, a stunning image of one of the new space hotels in low orbit over the heart-stoppingly beautiful blue-green curvature of the Earth makes him sit up and take notice. “Now we’re talking,” he murmurs. “Book me a seat, Siri.”
  • 6. 6 The Future of Travel 2024 7 “Within five years, gadgets such as Google Glass will be using these areas of technology and we’ll see a significant change in how we handle foreign languages, or choose what restaurant to eat at, based on the wisdom of crowds that we can instantly access.” “TOM is fictitious, but the technologies mentioned in the above scenario are either real, being tested or undergoing prototype development,” says The Future Laboratory’s Co-founder Martin Raymond, who collaborated on this report with Skyscanner. Our research and expert interviews suggest that in 10 years’ time the era of time-consuming online travel discovery, research and booking across multiple platforms and devices will be long gone. As Skyscanner’s Head of B2B Filip Filipov says, “In the near future, there is going to be a mass-market conversion to semantic, location-aware and Big Data [data sets that are beyond our reasonable abilities to manage or comprehend so that more imaginative methods and ways to visualize them are required] applications, which will be of transformative use to travelers. It’s tempting to raise a skeptical eyebrow at forecasts about the impact of new and emerging technology on the travel industry of the 2020s. Predicting which interfaces and devices will succeed – and which will disappear without trace – is tricky.
  • 7. 8 The Future of Travel 2024 98 The Future of Travel 2024 9 “Ten years ago, who would have predicted that it would be the norm today to communicate directly with all friends on vacation by Skype or mobile phone rather than sending a postcard, or make travel choices from a website on a computer screen rather than from a travel agent’s brochure?” asks Filipov. The explosion of the internet and its associated digital technologies since the turn of the century has disrupted almost every field of human endeavor, and transformed the way that we plan, book and experience travel. Nevertheless, Filipov believes this technological revolution is in its infancy. “We are at the start of a journey that will see personalization of content and advances in areas such as Artificial Intelligence that will totally change once again the way we book and take our vacations,” he says. This is the world that the Skyscanner’s Future of Travel report explores as it reveals and explains the range of technology being developed today that will evolve to shape the global travel industry of tomorrow. “Travel services such as Skyscanner will be able to deploy online semantic and intuitive tools that will know your preferences: that you are a regular business traveler that you only ever take carry-on that you always fly first class and like to stay in a four-star hotel no more than a mile from your meeting. “Summer vacation booking will be similarly seamless, knowing that you prefer sunny destinations with limited flying time, that you take at least two suitcases, and like a hotel with a gym close to a beach. “By the middle of the next decade, travel websites will be able to deliver personalized inspiration to the digital technology in your home almost without being asked. “Essentially, think of a world of travel where the traveler comes first – and the technology comes together to make that experience intuitive, rich and inspirational.”
  • 8. 10 The Future of Travel 2024 1110 The Future of Travel 2024 11 A decade from today, all travelers will have at their disposal a startling array of next-generation digital technologies that will transform the discovery, planning and booking of their next journey into a seamless and intuitive experience. As Skyscanner’s CEO and Co-Founder Gareth Williams puts it, “Travel search and booking will be as easy as buying a book on Amazon.” In this first section of Skyscanner’s three-part Future of Travel report, we discover and dissect the advances in wearable, intelligent technology, virtual reality and haptic websites – which take advantage of a user’s touch to provide tactile feedback – and semantic search engines that our experts and researchers predict will revolutionize the travel landscape of 2024.
  • 9. 12 The Future of Travel 2024 13 1.Digital Travel Buddies 12 The Future of Travel 2024 Long gone are the days when TOM (Traveler of the Millennium) would have had to spend hours online, tapping away on a computer keyboard to compare flight, hotel and rental car prices and various permutations on dozens of different websites. In the 2000s a range of comparison sites emerged to ease the stress of travel planning and booking, but by 2024, our traveler will have a new friend to take the strain out of travel discovery, search and booking: his Digital Travel Buddy. Global Futurist Daniel Burrus, author of Technotrends: How to Use Technology to Go Beyond Your Competition, best explains the nature of the high-tech companion that our traveler will have at his command. It will essentially be an Artificial Intelligence device, constantly connected to the web, which has learned to intimately understand our individual preferences. “It could have the face, voice and personality of our favorite actor or comedian and appear to us as a 3D hologram image, or inside a virtual environment, at our verbal command. “It will personalize all of our travel experiences, planning itineraries based on our particular likes and dislikes, and act as a tour guide, telling us only about the elements of the destination that it knows we will be interested in. “Travel brands will even be able to rent out a personalized e-agent to their consumers as part of the vacation package. Customers will be able to continually engage and interact with their travel company to fine-tune their trips in real time and troubleshoot any problems that arise.” “In the 2020s, each of us will have an individual ‘e-agent’ that goes everywhere with us, inside a watch or a small piece of jewelry,” he says.
  • 10. 14 The Future of Travel 2024 15 The app can find relevant online travel reviews and comments based on its user’s past preferences and searches. A traveler with a young family, for example, might be presented with a selection of reviews of family-friendly hotels in his destination of choice. Other technology brands are developing interactive devices that feel more like friends than machines. South Korea-based Samsung’s SAMI interactive AI system will automatically monitor the lifestyle and health needs of its user by plugging into the aggregated knowledge of the 1.5 trillion sensor-enabled smartphones, wearable and other smart devices that will exist by 2020, according to project director Luc Julia. Mobile devices that can speak to us and understand our verbal replies, and even our facial expressions, are also under development. Microsoft has Cortana, a voice-activated personal assistant that will act as a human-sounding interface to all of the brand’s email and search functions. “It will be deeply personalized, based on the advanced, almost magical intelligence in our cloud that learns more and more over time about people and the world,” says Steve Ballmer, former CEO and now Director of Microsoft. TOM’s Digital Travel Buddy will have had his origins in today’s emerging technologies. Desti, a conversational travel app from SRI International, the research institute that developed Apple’s Siri system, is one of this new breed. It is pointing the way towards a world in which our mobile devices will learn from their interactions with us.
  • 11. 16 The Future of Travel 2024 17 More importantly, by scanning our searches online, and cross-referencing our vacation, food, travel and hotel searches it will use predictive algorithms to make original suggestions tailored to our price range, peer and gender needs, and whether we usually prefer a fly-and-flop trip or a white-knuckle adventure vacation. The Future Laboratory Co-founder Martin Raymond says, “We’re used to Amazon and Google suggesting products to us. Soon this kind of predictive software will be putting together detailed and tailored travel experiences, like our own top-end digital travel broker. “Drawing on the huge amounts of personal data we post about ourselves on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Mixi, Sina Weibo, Cyworld, Kaixin001, Orkut, Vine and Instagram, it will deliver intimate, personal and surprising itineraries, with everything from exotic food trips to guides to neighborhoods where you are most likely to meet like-minded people who share your tastes in food, drink and socializing.” Intel’s RealSense 3D camera is an example of the type of technology that travel devices in the 2020s will use to recognize and react to human emotions. The camera is being designed to gauge the mood of its users by their facial expression and body posture, and to understand and respond to colloquial verbal commands. The move towards the advent of the Digital Travel Buddy can be seen all around us. Russian innovation brand i-Free has designed an Artificial Intelligence system that processes a listener’s question and supplies an appropriate verbal answer in a split second to enable its bio-robot Frank to hold meaningful, sequential conversations. Facebook’s own Artificial Intelligence Unit, launched in October 2013, is working to create an intelligent voice recognition system too. “The goal is to use new approaches to AI to help make sense of all the content that people share so we can generate new insights about the world to answer people’s questions,” says CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “In time, I think it will be possible to build services that are much more natural to interact with and that can help solve many more problems than any existing technologies today,” he says. 16 The Future of Travel 2024 17
  • 12. 18 The Future of Travel 2024 19 As the software systems for a talking, learning online entity converge to create the “mind” of our traveler’s Digital Travel Buddy in the early 2020s, so a range of interconnected miniaturized hardware will serve as its wearable “body.” The first generation of such devices is gaining market traction today. Annual sales of wearable technology such as wristwatches with smartphone functions, including the Sony Smartwatch and the Samsung Galaxy Gear, will hit 485 million by 2018, according to market research company ABI Research. Google will ship 6.6 million units a year of Google Glass, the camera-enabled smart glasses, by 2016, moving the technology into the mass market, according to IMS Research. By 2017, we will be using on-body devices powered by microchips just seven nanometers in length – the width of 15–20 atoms – that will “transform every area of our lives,” according to Renée James, President of Intel. But in the 2020s, wearable devices will be far smaller and faster, and with many more capabilities, providing the technology to make the Digital Travel Buddy a practical reality. “The miniaturization of technology,” says The Future Laboratory’s Martin Raymond, “will open a whole new world of possibilities as we combine wearable technology with near invisible technology. Already, parents are using trackers for their children when they are traveling with them – phone devices that tell you where they are geographically, and increasingly, tags that can be embedded in clothing, even inserted under the skin. Add to that the possibility of retinal cameras – cameras so small you can mount them on a pair of glasses that won’t look anything like Google Glass looks now. You won’t just be able to track your child, you’ll be able to see their vacation, or where they are, from their point of view.” Being able to see a destination from someone else’s point of view is proving popular in Melbourne, with their remote control tourist. Here, tourists and special tour guides wear camera-mounted helmets, while their armchair equivalents sit at home and suggest places they should walk or cycle to. “While it’s not quite the same thing,” says Raymond, “it gives you an idea of how wearable and mounted technologies will be used in the future.” A next-generation smart watch, reportedly being developed by Apple, could contain 3D holographic displays and web access, placing streetscapes, a terrain schematic, 3D walk-through versions of a neighborhood, or the fastest route through an airport at our fingertips.
  • 13. 20 The Future of Travel 2024 21 Alistair Hann, Skyscanner’s Chief Technology Officer, predicts that the advent of the Digital Travel Buddy will change not just the way that travelers plan and book, but their experience of the journey itself too. “Imagine wearing a device that is able to provide a simultaneous verbal translation of what your taxi driver is saying to you in Chinese,” he says. “Or a device that is able to translate your restaurant menu from Russian into English in seconds? The possibilities of these technologies are endless. Suddenly, travel will hold no fears.” Grand predictions are often made about the emergence of game-changing new technologies, only for the date of their launch to move further into the future. However, Dr. Ian Yeoman, Travel Futurologist and Associate Professor of Tourism Futures at Victoria University of Wellington, is confident that advanced wearable devices will become part of the mainstream by the end of the decade. “Developments such as Google Glass will be mainstream within 18 months. Within five years, everything that Google Glass can do now will be available on a contact lens,” he says. And the trend for mobile device miniaturization will gain momentum as current advances such as microscopic bendable circuits developed by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology – 1/60th the thickness of a human hair and implantable on a contact lens – will hit the mass market by the end of this decade. All will make it easier to access and indeed to carry so-called wearable or bodyTECH, which some of our experts are now referring to as buddyTech.
  • 14. 22 The Future of Travel 2024 23 2.Virtual Becomes a Reality His wearable AI connects online with a new generation of “try before you buy” websites operated by travel brands. It returns with a palette of virtual reality samples that allow our traveler to see the sights, hear the sounds, and even feel the landscape, of a variety of different travel experiences. His sense of anticipation and excitement will be piqued by a 3D, multi-sensory stroll along a sun-drenched Costa Rican shore, a trek along a snow-covered path high in the Andes or a dive on the Barrier Reef. A simple verbal command sets TOM off on a journey of travel discovery from the comfort of his own bed. “I really need a vacation,” he murmurs, sending his Digital Travel Buddy into action on his behalf. 22 The Future of Travel 2024 23
  • 15. 24 The Future of Travel 2024 25 “Virtual reality won’t replace real travel, as is often portrayed in sci-fi movies,” says Technology Futurist Daniel Burrus. Resembling a set of ski goggles, the headset combines smartphone technology and motion sensors to produce an experience similar to watching a never-ending IMAX screen. In essence, images are projected onto the retina in much the same way as old-style projectors throw images onto a screen. 24 The Future of Travel 2024 25 Another virtual reality headset, designed by a team at Vienna University of Technology, allows a user seemingly to walk through an endless labyrinth while really walking around in circles in a small room. The researchers are now adding motion and proximity-sensing technology that will enable more than one person to experience the same labyrinth at the same time without bumping into each other, according to New Scientist magazine. In 2014, the technology to make this future vision a reality is already beginning to emerge. A CGI tool developed by technology brand 3RD Planet enables users to take an amazingly realistic walk through the streets of a city. A research team from the University of North Carolina have engineered a virtual reality recreation of a crowd scene outside St Paul’s Cathedral in London in 1622 that allows visitors to change viewpoints at will. The new Oculus Rift VR headset from US start-up Oculus VR is the predecessor of the virtual reality devices that our traveler will deploy in his home as he samples a range of vacation scenarios in 3D. “It will become a new form of show rooming, an incredible 3D taste of a destination that will make travelers long to experience the real thing.”
  • 16. 26 The Future of Travel 2024 27 Other advances will add a further layer of sensation to the virtual reality experience: the sense of touch through haptic technologies. Disney has created a new interface called REVEL that gives tactile feedback through minute vibrations from virtual 3D objects. The system will enable users to feel the craters on the Moon, the spines of a cactus or the outlines of a delicate object. Japan’s NHK public broadcast network is now prototyping a similar system that enables viewers to “feel” the surfaces and textures of objects viewed on screen, including sand, sea and foliage. Meanwhile, at Japan’s Tachi Lab, researcher Masashi Nakatani is working on the haptic TECHTILE toolkit, a device that will enable you to convert sounds into textures and surfaces that you can feel. “Imagine being able to feel the heat of the sun on your hand,” says The Future Laboratory’s Martin Raymond. “With software like the TECHTILE, which converts sound waves to tactile feelings, you will be able to feel the sound of a gamelan in Bali, or touch fluttering prayer flags in Tibet or Bhutan.” By 2020, similar vibration-based haptic techniques will enable shoppers to feel the texture of the wool, silk or cotton of the item they are about to buy on their tablet, according to Robyn Schwartz, Associate Director of IBM Research Retail Analytics. By the next decade, travelers will be able to use similar technology to feel the sand between their toes on a beach thousands of miles away.
  • 17. 28 The Future of Travel 2024 2928 The Future of Travel 2024 29 “In 10 years’ time, a traveler will be able to take a virtual reality walk through the hotel he is planning to book in real time,” says Nik Gupta, Director of Hotels at Skyscanner. ‘He will be able to watch staff preparing his room as it happens, see the staff in action and watch chefs cooking his favorite food. That will be ground- breaking – an incredibly powerful tool for building engagement and trust between the traveler and the brand.” TOM’s relaxed and exciting virtual reality tour through a series of very different travel scenarios allows him to fine-tune his desires. He now knows whether he would prefer a city break to a mountain walking adventure or a trip to an exotic beach idyll. Reacting instantly to his decision, his Digital Travel Buddy sets off on the next stage of discovery: actively seeking, and finally planning and booking, his trip of choice.
  • 18. 30 The Future of Travel 2024 31 3.Semantic Search TOM’s next stage of engagement is with the powerfully intuitive and semantic search tools that will be deployed online by the leading travel brands of the next decade. 30 The Future of Travel 2024 31
  • 19. 32 The Future of Travel 2024 33 Connected to him via his Digital Travel Buddy, which communicates hyper-personalized preferences from his favorite breakfast food to his gym regime and the stitch count of the cotton sheets on his bed, he uses gestures and voice commands to interact as the tools engage Big Data analytics to compile a selection of ideal vacation packages. It is a one-stop-shop experience with every aspect of his journey researched, considered and booked. As Stefan Rust, CEO of Exicon, says, “In the near future it is likely that all-encompassing mobile apps will provide a thorough, end-to-end service – aggregates of airlines, airports, hotels and ground transport systems will provide the tools for every part of the experience. “Before your flight, the technology will enable you to research and book your flight and arrange your local travel. At the airport it will guide you through the terminal, tell you where to check in, track your luggage, exchange your currency and let you plan your arrival, book a room and rent a car, as well as providing you with all the information you will need when you get to your destination.” Technology and online brands are swiftly developing intuitive new approaches to searching in cyberspace. Users will come to expect their preferences and previous search filters to be saved, even allowing brands to access their social media networks, search history, even email strands more proactively so that they can develop intimate, comprehensive cartograms of their needs, likes and possible future behavior.
  • 20. 34 The Future of Travel 2024 35 Margaret Rice-Jones, Chairman of Skyscanner, believes this technology will enable travel brands to more effectively use a person’s social media presence, or even advice from their peer-to-peer networks, to more accurately and imaginatively suggest future travel options. “In the near future, we will see more integration across travel sites and social media sites,” she says. Tech firm Affectiva is creating a facial coding algorithm that will enable search engine software to read human expressions and thereby judge whether the results it is providing are pleasing or frustrating the user. New personal discovery engine Nara uses neuroscience concepts to mimic and understand the thought patterns of the human brain, allowing it to build a “digital DNA” of a user’s likes and dislikes. Facebook’s Graph Search answers questions in colloquial – and even grammatically incorrect English – and makes intuitive suggestions drawing on peer-to-peer social media data. Increasingly, these tools will automatically trawl the huge amount of personal customer data at their disposal to instantly ensure that travel search results conform to an individual user’s demands and desires. By 2024 this intuitive approach will be developed further, with software able to read facial expressions or build a digital DNA of user preferences. 34 The Future of Travel 2024 35
  • 21. 36 The Future of Travel 2024 37 “Big Data can be a powerful force in transforming the travel industry,” according to the Amadeus IT Group. “It could be one of the most influential initiatives since the online reservation system.” Not everyone agrees. Technology insiders, such as Betsy Bilhorn, Vice-President of Product Management at Scribe Software, dismiss it as over-hyped and likely to cause confusion through information overload rather than provide a holistic view of customers’ needs. However The Future Laboratory’s Martin Raymond highlights that “As well as technology influencing technology, how we develop technology is hugely influenced by the consumer.” “In our research with Generation I (Generation Interactive) pre-teens, and their older brothers and sisters that we dubbed Generation D (Digital), we discovered that few of them fear the arrival of Big Friendly Data, as we call it, while more of them welcome it, provided it brings them closer to what they want – seamless communications with the world around them.” As Travel Futurologist Dr. Ian Yeoman says, “Our young children will think that it is completely natural to talk to a machine that understands them without tapping a keyboard or touching a screen. “Speech recognition involving smart agents that can use natural language and learn from experience is already becoming more mainstream.” Within minutes, TOM’s wearable AI will present him with a selection of door-to-door tailored travel packages to browse through. Once he has made his choice, his Digital Travel Buddy will make all of the bookings – and manage payment transactions – by liaising with a travel brand’s intelligent software system. That will be travel discovery in 2024. A trip sampled, researched and booked intuitively and seamlessly in less than an hour – without ever leaving the house. It is a world that will seem perfectly normal to our traveler. Martin Raymond concludes, “Current travelers and users are wary of online systems having this level of in-depth understanding of their thoughts and feelings. “But teenagers and the under-10s are puzzled about why people are so worried. They expect technology to work intuitively, to offer them solutions as they need them without ever being directly asked to do so.” By 2024, TOM will take it for granted that a whole series of online software search entities will talk to him and gauge his reactions and emotions as they seek to anticipate his travel needs.
  • 22. 38 The Future of Travel 2024 39 Conclusion TOM’s booking and planning experience will be incredibly seamless, collaborative, bespoke and immersive. 38 The Future of Travel 2024 39 A Digital Travel Buddy, a wearable Artificial Intelligence device incorporating the latest voice- and gesture-control technology, will intuitively sift through the online information overload to provide him with the tailored trip of his dreams. Travel discovery will be enhanced by brand websites that deploy next-generation virtual reality and haptic tools to enable our traveler to see, hear and feel a series of possible destinations from the comfort of his own home. Booking will be a quick, easy, stress-free and one-stop experience conducted through semantic websites that are capable of learning the likes and dislikes of a customer from his previous online actions, and of conversing with them verbally in everyday language.
  • 23. 40 The Future of Travel 2024 41 The financial ebullience of the blossoming markets will be a necessary global antidote to the continuing economic turbulence that will shape the attitude of travelers in the pruned markets – the economies in Europe and the US whose growth has been cut back in the past 5 years by post-crash debt and austerity. As IPK International’s Global Travel Trends report 2012/2013 says, “An increasing number of these countries are not able to pay their debts, the debt crisis has not reached its end and the resulting negative impacts on travel behavior – so-called ‘downward mobility’ – in Western Europe, the United States and Japan cannot be excluded.” The final factor that will help to define the global travel industry of the 2020s is a social one. A demographic time bomb is waiting in the wings as the world’s population ages at an unprecedented rate. The past century has witnessed the most rapid decline in mortality rates in human history with life expectancy for the world as a whole rising from 47 years in 1950–55 to 69 years in 2005–2010, according to the UN. In 1950, there were twice as many children under 15 as adults over 60. By 2050, the 60+ group will outnumber children by two to one. So, in 2024, our traveler will make his journey in a world in which blossoming market demand for new experiences is counter-balanced by the financial caution of the still-recovering pruned markets of Europe and the United States. And he will take it as a given that every aspect of travel, from discovery and booking to transit and flying, will incorporate the latest digital technology in the way that he does – seamlessly and unselfconsciously. Appendix 1: A 2020s Travel Landscape To understand our 2020s traveler’s journey, we need to consider the technological, economic and social forces that will reshape the global travel industry over the next 10 years. Perhaps the most far-reaching factor at work is the growth towards digital maturity. In 2014, cyberspace and its associated technologies are no longer as novel and surprising. They are becoming the backdrop to all of our lives. In China, 464 million people, or 34.5 percent of the total population, now access the internet through smartphones or wireless mobile devices, according to the China Internet Network Information Center. Asia will see the biggest growth in the middle class – predicted to triple to 1.7 billion by 2020, according to Brookings Institution – whose spending power will drive new global behavior and attitudes to digital technology. By 2024, internet connectivity – and the mobile devices that enable it – will be as unremarkable as electric lighting and central heating are today. The technology will be seamlessly enmeshed in the day- to-day world of travelers in both the developed and developing economies. According to Cisco Systems, there will be 50 billion devices connected to the internet by 2020. Simultaneously, there will be an explosion of travel from the blossoming markets of Asia, South America and Africa – the new emerging economies of each region – as their consumer spending power increases enormously. By 2030, Asia, the world’s largest and fastest-growing regional economy, will double its GDP to $67 trillion, outstripping GDP projections for Europe and the Americas combined, according to the Boston Consulting Group. Traveling millions from the blossoming markets are ushering in an era of global mobility, with the global travel industry – and therefore demand for travel opportunities and experiences – expanding rapidly in the next decade. The World Travel & Tourism Council forecast 3.2 percent growth in global travel in 2013, easily outstripping the predicted 2.4 percent growth in global GDP. The gap was even more pronounced in the emerging economies in 2012, where China and South Africa posted 7 percent annual travel growth and Indonesia reported a 6 percent rise. 40 The Future of Travel 2024 41
  • 24. 42 The Future of Travel 2024 Appendix 2: Research methodology This Skyscanner report is the work of a team of 56 editors, researchers and futures networkers, across key international cities. This team built a detailed picture of the next 10 years, looking at how breakthrough technologies and exciting new destinations will shape the global travel industry in the 2020s. The experts We explored the travel technologies and behaviors to come, by plugging into the know-how of a range of world-renowned experts, including Futurist Daniel Burrus, author of Technotrends: How to Use Technology to Go Beyond Your Competition, and Travel Futurologist Dr. Ian Yeoman. We also drew on the background lessons provided by digital strategist Daljit Singh; Microsoft’s UK Chief Envisioning Officer Dave Coplin; Google Creative Lab Executive Creative Director Steve Vranakis; Kevin Warwick, Professor of Cybernetics at Reading University; and Martin Raymond, Co-founder of The Future Laboratory and author of CreATE, The Tomorrow People, and The Trend Forecaster’s Handbook. From Skyscanner, the following experts were called on for their insights, expertise, and where possible, quoted directly in the report: Margaret Rice-Jones, Chairman; Gareth Williams, CEO and Co-Founder; Alistair Hann, CTO; Filip Filipov, Head of B2B; Nik Gupta, Director of Hotels; and Dug Campbell, Product Marketing Manager. In tandem with the above, we used The Future Laboratory’s online network, LS:N Global, to supplement research, as well as findings from The Future Laboratory’s annual series of Futures reports on travel, technology, food and hospitality. 42 The Future of Travel 2024
  • 25. www.skyscanner2024.com Contact us For further information regarding this report please contact: Randi Wolfson, Skyscanner – randi.wolfson@skyscanner.com / 305-967-6304 or Meagan Soffera, Access Communications – msoffera@accesspr.com / 980-236-7934 For more information on Skyscanner visit www.skyscanner.com