Back To News/PR Index
|

|
Skyscanner: New Report Shows External
Forces Driving Positive Change in Travel Industry
|
Part One of Skyscanner’s Future of Travel 2024 Report Looks at Innovations
Like our own “e-Agents” That Will Shake Up and Redefine How We Plan and Book Travel
|

Advances like these in technology, together with shifts in economic and political power, and fluctuations in culture and climate, will redefine the travel industry. “By 2024, travel search and booking will be as easy as buying a book on Amazon,” says Skyscanner CEO and co-founder Gareth Williams. “Brands will adapt to changing consumer behavior that expects the travel process to focus more on inspiration and personalized service than the tactics of finding, scheduling and optimizing travel plans.”

Trends Shaping the Future of Travel Planning and Booking

The report identifies three top trends that will shape travel discovery, planning and booking in the 2020s.

• Digital Travel Buddies
• The next decade will see the emergence of wearable, internet-connected, artificial intelligence devices as travel planning and booking tools.
• Digital Travel Buddies will find relevant, personalized online travel reviews and comments based on users’ past preferences and predictive algorithms, and, when combined with social data, will suggest intimate and personal itineraries for users.
• Miniaturized, wearable technology will be able to provide simultaneous feedback, such as real-time translations, as well as include holographic displays of airport maps or neighborhoods.
• Virtual Becomes a Reality
• Virtual reality won’t replace travel but instead create a new form of show rooming, making travelers long for the real thing and further informing the decision making process.
• Haptic technology, which takes advantage of a user’s touch to provide tactile feedback, will enable consumers to actually feel what they could experience during their trip, such as the texture of the bed at a hotel, the water in a river or the plushness of an airplane seat.
• Travelers will be able to see rooms and amenities before booking, creating a powerful tool for building engagement between the traveler and the brand.
• Semantic Search
• Voice and gesture controlled online tools will help the traveler book their personalized trip.
• A user’s response through speech tools will trigger the trawling of personal customer data at a search engine’s disposal to ensure results conform to an individual’s demands and desires.
• Facial coding algorithms will enable search engines to read and react to human expressions and adjust results based on the user’s response.

The second and third parts of the report will be released later in 2014. The second part, “Travel Journeys,” will discuss how a technology will transform the airport and flight experience with examples such as molecular security scanners and shop-able virtual walls; the third section, “Destinations & Hotels,” will detail the new experiences that await the future traveler, from newest vacation hot spots to underwater and space hotels.

“By the middle of the next decade, travel services such as Skyscanner will be able to deliver personalized inspiration to the digital technology in your home almost without being asked,” predicts Filip Filipov, Skyscanner’s Head of B2B. “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.”

To read the full report, visit www.skyscanner2024.com.

Research methodology
The Future of Travel 2014 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. This team 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.

The report 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. The report 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.

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.

About Skyscanner
Skyscanner is a leading global travel search site offering an unbiased, comprehensive and free flight search service as well as instant online comparisons for hotels and car hire. Having launched in 2003, it is now helping 25 million unique visitors each month to find the best deals, through powerful technology we have built across our website and mobile app.

With more than 400 employees spanning 35 nationalities across six global offices – Edinburgh, Glasgow, Singapore, Beijing, Miami, Barcelona, Skyscanner places great emphasis on its global coverage, with search available in over 30 languages.

Skyscanner’s highly-rated free mobile apps are available on iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry and Windows 8 devices and have been downloaded over 30 million times.

For more information, visit www.skyscanner.com.

Contacts:
Skyscanner
Randi Wolfson
Head of Communications, Americas
305-967-6304
or
Meagan Soffera
980-236-7934
Access Communications
for Skyscanner