HOW TRAVEL WILL CHANGE IN THE FUTURE BECAUSE OF TECHNOLOGY

creating personalized experiences and smoothing out points of friction to create the ultimate customer journey

Yogi Berra, a baseball great, best summed up the dilemma facing the travel industry when he said, "Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded." Travel is the ultimate goal of anyone who wants to try something new. It gives you the chance to learn about oneself and the world while giving you time and space to spend with loved ones and make memories. It’s also an economic behemoth, with Americans spending $1.35 trillion last year to seemingly visit the same destinations, take the same selfies, and then wait in endless security lines to fly home. An excellent illustration of this is South by Southwest (SXSW), which morphed from a small music festival into a weeklong jamboree at the end of this year, making travel a nightmare for many. As it turns out, scaling aspirations is much simpler than scaling destinations.

How to resolve that tension was the subject of discussion at the Fast Company Grill during SXSW in a panel presented by Capital One Business featuring Thomas Geraghty, vice president of digital innovation at Universal Destinations and Experiences; Jessica Schinazi, CEO of the luggage brand Away; and Richard Bailey, founder of the Brando, an ultraluxury eco-resort built on the late actor Marlon Brando’s private atoll in French Polynesia. (Scroll to the bottom to watch the entire panel discussion.) Their argument, surfaced across very different business models and market segments, was that technology’s role in travel is to smooth any points of friction and personal experiences, and then disappear. Turning Berra’s aphorism inside out, the goal is to make everyone feel as if they’re the first person to discover this.

For instance, the resort's remarkable infrastructure, such as on-site solar and biofuel power and air conditioning powered by seawater pumped from 3,000 feet below the surface, is deliberately hidden from guests at the Brando. Bailey stated, "The built environment merely channels their discovery of this amazing natural beauty." Long average stays follow a slower arc, but guests arrive with bucket lists in tow. Bailey went on to say, "Eventually you get to that moment just sitting at sunset on the beach in a moment of self-reflection, taking stock of where you are in life." He was referring to that particular moment. And that’s the destination.

EXPERIENCES WITH A BESPOKE

Universal Studios has the opposite problem, which is how to tailor the experience of tens of millions of annual visitors, most of whom are new to the parks or have returned only a handful of times. When a family goes through the gate, Universal doesn't know if they have a 15-year-old or a 5-year-old. Geraghty aspires to offer planning tools allowing family members to design their own itineraries prior to arrival. He stated, "We really want people to have one-to-one personalized service at that scal…

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来源：reddit，领域：tech，保留分：0.67