Are you a traveler? Have you made several international trips in the last one or two decades? If it is so, you must have been astonishing about the greatest innovations that have been taking place in the travel industry. Because, the travel distribution landscape has been changing tremendously, and for the past few years, we are witnessing its evolvement with arising trends and technologies. Now, the industry’s condition has become seemingly like, ‘the technological changes are not just an inevitable but a necessity to remain relevant.’ That means the industry would keep changing, and we can expect a great many changes in the future.
That being said, in this article, let’s have a brief discussion about a few technologies that are going to disrupt the travel industry in 2020.
The process of applying for a passport or a visa was seemingly a complicated task that involved a lot of time-consuming before a few years. But, the situation has changed today. The advanced integration and communication features of the Internet are being leveraged to ensure that you can essentially skip the red tape and have all the documents that you need urgently. And, this indicates the significant advancements that we gained from the days of paper-based documentation to a position of full synchronization with digital technologies.
AI aided biometrics is one of the crucial parts of traveling that focuses on identifying and ensuring the safety of travelers. This is possible mainly by employing a combination of biometric technology and AI to manage, identify, and match passengers to manifests. These systems typically employ fingertips, iris scans, as well as facial recognition technology, which is recently used in the USA, China, Australia, UK, etc. Also, these technologies are good enough to spread out even wider, as more countries take chances to improve security and increase efficiency simultaneously.
It is indubitably clear that data science and machine learning have been facilitating disruptions in several industries, including the travel industry. The travel and tourism industry, being as dispersed as it is geographically and otherwise, is poised to benefit from the increased efficiency that comes with being able to analyze big data. And, businesses can understand trends and they can predict the market effectively through this.
Nowadays, property management systems can predict with remarkable accuracy the amount of business that a hotel, restaurant or other travel business can expect over a particular period of time. Thus, it enables them to make better plans about catering for their customers’ needs, according to Yolanda Ceron, CEO of Voyagers Travel.
Mobile phones have been taking the place of usual paper documents so seamlessly that today it seems inevitable in the travel sector from boarding passes to the check-in process. Mobile boarding pass offers increased security for both airlines and passengers. It also helps to ensure that the boarding process is streamlined by reducing the time for several processes, including printing.
In addition, it is interesting to note that the way airports are leveraging mobile technology is by allowing passengers to synchronize their smartphones with departure displays. Thus, passengers can keep a close eye on their flights and even get direct notifications wherever they are.
