While planning their trips, typical travelers go through five main stages: dreaming, planning, exploring, experiencing, and sharing. This is usually very fragmented and requires many tools and sources to gather before living the final experience. Smart trip planning should be personalized and tailored to user’s needs and provide live assistance while traveling. Our goal in the following is to suggest few technologies that would close the loop and provide a more enjoyable, personalized, and healthy travel experience.
Virtual assistants and chatbots for trip planning
Chatbots are useful for improving user and customer experiences in a variety of industries, including education, tourism, healthcare, entertainment, and commerce. Trip planning can also be greatly enriched by incorporating intelligent virtual assistants with chatbot capability. What if our chatbot was able to understand a conversation like “I’ll join you for the movies after my last meeting” and help us organize accordingly? Or can answer a question like “What is happening around during the weekend?”. If our trip planning application knows the user’s context, whether she feels tired or hungry, it can recommend tailored offers and promotions that satisfies her needs, by enriching her indoor and outdoor navigation experiences.
Authentic check-ins through facial recognition
With the huge user generated content available on the variety of social networks, authentic content become a vital step towards having a genuine trip planning experience. Someone recommending a place or an activity without even visiting or verifying it, may lead to a horrible experience by those users who follow such a recommendation. Therefore, authentic check-ins are essential where users can become authentic local guides by going through a real-time ID verification step using facial recognition technology, geo-referenced videos, or verified self-registration kiosks.
Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality
According to Statista*, the global augmented reality AR market will grow from $5.91 billion in 2017 to $198 billion by 2025. Augmented reality can play a vital role in enriching users experience (UX) while navigating their trips. Users will be able to navigate a real-world environment in a natural-way using mounted AR glasses or mobile-based AR, and experience both real-world and virtual objects enhancing and augmenting the UX. In addition, VR can be employed to transport people to complete immersive experiences based on the location and the context. Selected museum venues or local activities will be transformed into immersive VR rooms, so that they can live the authentic experience beforehand and decide accordingly. Consequently, users can also interact with each other while exploring digital recreations of their travel destinations in the digital metaverse environment.
Contact-less payments, NFTs, and IoT Technologies
Other dimensions that can improve travelers’ experiences duringtheir trips, include using the Internet of Things (IoT) technologiesto ensure internet-based connectivity of everyday devices thatusers can carry, thus allowing smooth and low-cost data transfer any where and at any time.
Accepting contactless payments at any location a traveler mayvisit is another important aspect of travel technology. This enablesa more secure and less stressed travel experience, and the abilityto process payments more quickly, even when customers do nothave cash, credit, or debit cards. It also saves time and improvescustomer satisfaction. Contactless payments began as a convenience, but in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, they have evolved into an important part of tourism marketing. Many people are also afraid to handle cash, especially in less-developed countries that are more exposed to fraud and theft actions.
Finally, one of the most prominent trends in tourism is to enable travelers to monetize their digital multimedia assets collected during their trips, such as, photos, videos, audio clips, etc. through secure digital asset management technologies. Recently, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have emerged as a new blockchain-based technique to validate and sell collectibles through secure peer-to-peer channels. Although, there are still challenges to be addressed for protecting intellectual properties and copyrights over these digital assets, this appears to be a very promising technology for secure digital trading.
*https://www.statista.com/statistics/897587/world-augmented-reality-market-value/