Nowadays, travellers have increasingly higher expectations about their travel experience, prioritizing comfort and accessibility. This includes:
– Instant information about current prices and availability;
– m-commerce;
– Users’ opinions and ratings;
– Previous travel records and personal preferences;
– Real time notifications, easy check-ins;
– On line concierge service; and much more.
Airports are one of the most negative parts of the trip, as they stand out for generating anxiety and dissatisfaction in travelers. They have a clear challenge related to their customer-oriented digital transformation in a competitive race among airports, which will be signaled by the following aspects:
a) Personalization of the travelers’ experience in all their touchpoints at the airport, considering it end-to-end to minimize the points of friction.
b) More collaboration with airlines to optimize check-in, boarding, luggage collection, etc.
c) Removal of the concept of travelers as a source of income during their stay at the airport, penalizing the fluency in their transit, which should be as short as possible.
d) Better balance between the security measures and the efficiency at managing passengers and luggage.
e) Integration with the transport ecosystem, which means solving the air connectivity, the land access and parking, the car rentals and related services; all of them, in a coordinated and simple way for travelers, removing anxiety in their decisions.
Mobile communication has drastically changed the scenario. Customers wish and hope to use their smartphones more and more, as a remote tool for managing their own lives; and clearly, traveling is a fundamental part of their lives. Our competitive environment, innovations, and tendencies are global. We have to get out of our comfort zone and explore what is going on in the rest of the world, as well as, try to understand potential new threats and opportunities, all of them defined by Technology. We have to accept that the Industry we knew 10 years ago is gone and persisting in keeping the same information, communication and relationship channels, and denying change, will only lead us to certain agony.
The aim of this paper is to provide answers to questions such which will be the main challenges for 2017? which will be the most important players’ strategies? which technologies will be more decisive and be more likely to be financed? to which tendencies at Travel Tech should we pay more attention to? and which business models seem to have more probabilities of success?
2017 Travel Tech Trends
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