It’s Not the Destination — It’s the Journey!

Business Unusual: Three takeaways for the travel industry

This summer, thanks to the unwelcome global pandemic, you’ve probably found yourself exploring your local neighborhood instead of hopping on a plane, train or automobile and heading to a more exotic destination for a much needed and deserved holiday.

Once COVID-19 restrictions subside, will the travel industry quietly slip back into to a new normal? I truly doubt it, and hence this post in my Business Unusual series!

Can’t touch this!

The air travel experience has been in need of a MAJOR overhaul for some time now, and today brings an unexpected opportunity to rethink the customer journey and redefine travel as we have known it for years.

In some ways, air travel hasn’t changed all that much since the early days of commercial flight. Travelers have had to adapt to increasingly restrictive regulations, while strapped-for-cash airlines focused their efforts on cutting costs and increasing capacity, rarely innovating to enhance the travel experience.

You may already be a fan of Dubai International Airport (DXB) where you can clear Passport Control in a mere 15 seconds, graciously smiling your way through its Smart Tunnel system, and where — in an almost prescient move last year — Emirates Airlines started rolling out facial recognition technology at their check-in desks and premium lounges, further reducing friction and making part of the airport journey almost a breeze.

However, not all airports were created equal, and many travelers still need to go through several touchpoints during their journey, which are risky and cumbersome, despite and because of all the disinfectant options available nowadays.

As contactless tech is already proven and its benefits are more than evident nowadays, this is a great opportunity for all airports and airlines around the world to adopt a ‘look but don’t touch’ policy, creating a seamless travel experience from drop-off to boarding, and leaving all the heavy lifting to biometric sensors, artificial intelligence and cloud computing.

Staycation: Redefined.

While no one can honestly predict how long it will take to regain our frequent travelers’ status. If you’re done joining Zoom calls, and you‘ve already binged everything interesting on Netflix, then order yourself a Virtual Reality (VR) headset, connect it to your laptop and let your imagination take you to your happy place: dive off the Red Sea coast, relax under a coconut tree overlooking the Indian Ocean, or explore artefacts and masterpieces in museums across the old world and the new, all from the comfort of your own couch.

Not so fast!

Although, we are in 2020, it is clear that our wildest predictions were just that, and the promise of mainstream VR travel did not materialize and remains a niche novelty. While this would have been a great example of tech and media coming together to make our lives better — even if for a fleeting moment, as I mentioned in the first Business Unusual post on Education, VR seems to have — once again — missed its moment!

Beam me up Scotty…

With airlines still operating at reduced capacity, and major portions of their fleets grounded (hopefully being upgraded to offer a better and safer post-pandemic travel experience), it is in times like these that we can explore creative partnerships to foster innovation and create really exciting and never seen before inventions. In the past, it took nations to overcome their historic conflicts for something truly exceptional to happen. Take the Concorde, a supersonic jet that operated for 34 years, shuttling privileged travellers in luxury at twice the speed of sound (I know I know; I am bit of a vintage tech nostalgic lately, more about that in a new series of posts coming up soon). Nowadays, this kind of groundbreaking innovation is channeled through public private partnerships, the work that Elon Musk’s SpaceX is doing with NASA is one example, and much closer to home, one can applaud the Dubai Future Accelerator for their many initiatives, particularly launching the Traveler Wellbeing Challenge in collaboration with the Aviation X Lab; I am definitely keeping an eye on the results, which should be announced later this month.

Oh… and speaking of travel, I am actually writing this post from Barcelona, where I will be spending a few months, thoroughly enjoying its advanced public transport system, amazing street-life and the milder weather, while exploring a whole new tech, business and design ecosystem — stay tuned for more!

Wirelessly yours.

This article was written on a laptop while references were researched on an accompanying tablet. The soundtrack was piped through Bluetooth headphones connected to a smartphone running a streaming music app. All devices were wirelessly connected to the home network.