New Technologies & Travel Revolution
- August 31, 2024
- SHAHID AHMED (CTO)
Technology is a crucial part of the tourism and travel industry, helping businesses with day-to-day operations, while also improving the customer experience. For this reason, it is important that hotels, airlines, restaurants, and other companies keep up with the latest technology trends within the travel industry. Today, nobody doubts that technology and travel are the perfect combinations. This joint force also plays a crucial role in the way we travel: from the vacation destination we choose, all the way to what we do once we're there and even in the time after we've come back from our adventure.
Important tech solutions for the tourism industry:- Mobile Technology:
Mobile tablets and smartphones have replaced large desktop computers, making them virtually extinct. This is helpful because many travelers take some type of mobile device with them on a trip. This helps hospitality businesses keep customers advised of changes and delays to their reservations, offer deals, and advertise by using GPS tracking. The cell phone has become our tour guide, travel agency, best restaurant locator, map, and more. It's by our side during the entire purchase journey.
- Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR and VR):
The past few years have seen an increase in AR or VR popularity among travel and tourism companies, and the trend is set to continue. These technologies are being used either for content marketing or to enhance the customers’ experiences. For example, airlines have started using VR technology to show travelers the cabins in advance, in order to increase ticket or ancillary services sales.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI):
AI is behind many evolving technologies and innovations in the travel and tourism sector. The ways in which it helps the industry can be classified into three major categories: Machine Learning, ChatBots or TravelBots, and Robots. Thanks to AI, operations that usually require human intervention and a lot of time to learn new skills, can be automated, thus speeding up processes, while improving quality and performance, and decreasing costs.
Wi-Fi connectivity:
When traveling, people want to always be connected, either to get destination ideas, options regarding places to visit or eat, find directions to points of interest, or share their experience with friends via social media or other connectivity platforms. As a result, investing in network services helps companies offer a more seamless and highly personalized experience to customers, boosts operational efficiency, real-time decision making, strengthens the physical (via CCTV) and the cybersecurity, along with data privacy.
IoT has a lot of potentials to shape the future of the travel and tourism industry, and companies have started to realize that. An example of an industry player using IoT to reduce anxiety and stress levels associated with lost bags is Lufthansa. Passengers can track their baggage via a link found on their mobile boarding pass in the Lufthansa app.
- Voice Technology:
Voice technology is another digital novelty that is beginning to disrupt the travel and tourism sector, as more and more customers switch from typed-in searches to voice interactions. More and more hotels have started experimenting with voice-activated devices. Among them are W Austin of Marriott International, Kimpton Alexis Hotel, and Westin Buffalo.
- Wearable devices:
Despite a sluggish start, travel and tourism companies are gradually using this technology to offer customers a more personalized and united experience. For instance, the Walt Disney Company deployed a wearable, customizable, RFID-equipped MagicBand, which connects to the theme park infrastructure, to reduce waiting times and track guests’ locations and activities.
The advent of technology is fostering a change in the travel and tourism industry regarding how companies interact with customers. Consequently, travel companies are adopting various technologies to improve operational efficiencies and meet customers’ expectations.