What trends dominated the travel market in 2019 and how new technologies have changed the travel industry.
2019 was a turning point for the travel industry in the field of mobile bookings, and its main trend was the consolidation and active use of technologies that were innovative in recent years. In addition, the trends of 2018 continued, such as solo travels, eco-travel and tourism impressions.
Destinations and types of recreation
The outgoing year has passed under different trends that have one main denominator: to gain experience, as if the tourist lived in the place where he arrived. Roughly speaking, the honor was ” to become local for a week.”
In 2019, a not quite trivial type of travel was popular – gastrotourism. First of all, interest in this type of travel is due precisely to the desire to try authentic dishes and plunge into the local culture. At the same time, most tourists claim that the quality and taste of the cuisine is far from the last when planning a trip, so tourists are increasingly giving preference to destinations where they could be surprised in culinary terms.
“Being local” was also popular during the travels themselves. Tourists preferred excursions and tours conducted by local residents or local bloggers. This is due not only to the interest of young generations in understanding culture, but also to the next trend, which can be called ” over tourism”, which implies a glut of cities and attractions with tourists.
Young generations do not want to stand in line for several hours or push their elbows in crowded areas. Accordingly, they chose either quiet and remote routes, or tours under the auspices of the local ones, in order to be imbued with the local culture and the things that residents of the city or country where the tourist came to cherish.
Another type of holiday that was popular in the past year is sports tourism and tourism of impressions. These two categories are closely intertwined. As for the first, trips to international marathons, triathlons and other sporting events were popular among sports fans. The second no less popular category refers to both extreme relaxation and hiking in various parks, forests, trails and mountains, but with less extreme sports, the so-called ” hiking” or ” backpacking” ( leisure with a backpack).
The desire of the millennial generation to work while resting and rest while working created another trend that became popular in 2019, it can be formulated as a “ nomadic worker”. The essence of this trend is as follows: the younger generation does not want to be tied to a specific place of residence, in addition, most of them need only access to the Internet to work. Therefore, many preferred to travel the world (often in Asia), rent apartments or houses and work using modern technology.
Another interesting trend was a change in the perception of museum tourism. More and more museums in the world are moving away from the educational position towards the educational and entertainment position. All this is done on the basis of new technologies, which we will discuss below.
Technology
Many museums and exhibition centers began to integrate augmented and virtual reality technologies. This is primarily due to the reluctance of young generations to simply walk around the museum. In addition to such integrations, various interactive and game exhibits appear that make people interact with the exhibition.
These museums can be both scientific ( for example, the Perot Museum in Dallas), and humanitarian ( for example, Newseum in Washington). In the past year, such a trend only intensified. The main problem facing museums now is not to overdo it and not turn them completely into technological or virtual platforms. It is necessary to leave that combination of innovation and conservatism in which trips to museums will be interesting to all generations.
Predictably, 2019 was marked by the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. The euphoria has passed – work days have begun. The “bottom of the iceberg” was not noticeable to ordinary tourists, since the lion’s share of innovation fell on the internal systems of travel companies. However, they did not forget about direct interaction with a client of the company. The introduction of some of these technologies was booming in one of the fastest growing travel industries – cruise. While on the travel, a consumer can be bored, it is better to watch free movies on websites like Putlocker, which will keep the user entertained
Royal Caribbean ships introduced robotic bars with artificial intelligence instead of bartenders. These robots can easily make a cocktail. AIDA introduced a model of using robots that will stand in the corridors of the ship and help tourists with navigation. And MSC introduced a voice assistant who is in the cabin and acts as a personal assistant.
By the way, a similar technology was introduced by several large hotel chains, for example, Marriott. These technologies already work in hotels, not only in the form of an assistant column, but also in the form of applications that open doors, control lights and curtains.
As for chat bots and voice control, the outgoing year has passed under the auspices of the transition from text chat bots to voice ones. Text chat bots are gradually being supplanted by voice chat bots, having not managed to capture the market everywhere. They pass into the category of business assistants, for example, for travel agents when searching for information or automatically responding to mail or a message. The tourist himself began to actively communicate with various voice assistants.
Simplifying the integration of businesses with Amazon and Google platforms has allowed even small companies to have their own voice assistant. By the way, over the past year the number of users of voice assistants has grown by 9.5%, and in all in the world there are already more than 50% of Internet users who communicate with a virtual assistant, while, for example, in the USA, voice assistants have already become regular users 33 % of Americans. The leaders are considered the countries of Asia and Oceania, where this figure exceeds 50%. Least of all they use voice assistants in Europe.
One of the interesting voice assistants that appeared in 2019 was the virtual assistants in KIA and Hyundai cars. Programs are endowed with artificial intelligence and using voice communication will be able to plan a route, tell where the nearest cafe or gas station, tell about the weather or the latest news. The programs are still at the stage of training and improvement, but it is already clear that for tourism it will be useful primarily for lovers of road travel.
Planning and process
As for travel planning and the booking process, here in 2019 there were no big changes, except for the continuation of the growth trend of bookings from mobile devices. According to a Google study , in 2018 in the USA, 48% of tourists were willing to book / book trips using only mobile devices.
In 2019, this number continued to grow, and most likely in the next year or two the era of desktop computers and laptops will be completed for another industry – the travel industry. This trait has been passed in South Korea, Japan, India and Brazil. The countries of Europe remain the most conservative, but even here the growth of bookings made from mobile devices continued.
The positions of social networks are also strengthening, although due to their already huge share, the growth rate has slowed. The most active generations in social networks were millennials (generation Y) and zoomers( generation Z). The share of those who used various social networks for inspiration before the rest, planning a vacation or just during the rest exceeded 95%.
As for price trends, they are disappointing – the average cost of travel around the world has increased. Hotel prices rose the most – up to 5%.
“Dangerous trends”
The main travel threats in 2019 were threats of terrorist acts and natural disasters. Global warming, according to some, has caused frequent hurricanes around the world.
Other examples of natural disasters were forest fires, which have recently been heard, and earthquakes or volcanic eruptions that are independent of humans. Frankly, these threats practically do not change from year to year, and with proper travel planning, they can almost always be avoided. But there are tragic exceptions, on December 9 the unexpected volcanic eruption on the island of White Island in the north of New Zealand took tourists by surprise, including passengers of a large cruise ship. As a result of the disaster, 16 people died, missing people are still missing.
It is often impossible to predict terrorist attacks and even calm European cities or concerts were dangerous. Despite the fact that physical attacks are most often suppressed by the authorities at the preparation stage, some were not avoided. There have been rumors of mass juggling in the USA that took place in popular tourist cities and even at the fair.
In the field of technical and informational significant attacks, failures and leaks in the past year were not observed, not counting several computer failures at airports in the United States and France, which led to many hours of delays. Also in 2019, there were several major hacker attacks, which resulted in the leak of personal data of tourists.
In general, it is safe to say that 2019 was extremely interesting for the travel world. We look forward to the year 2020, which will bring us the introduction of new technologies in all areas of tourism and get new travel experiences, both domestically and abroad.
