Technology has transformed the way we travel. If we think about it, we use technology from the moment we leave until the moment we return. When you think about what inspires you to travel, many of us will say it’s because of Facebook or Instagram. We will think of these destination accounts, such as beautiful destinations that show inspiring photographs of places we’d love to travel to.
Once we’ve been inspired, we have to plan our trip. We might use the airline or travel agent apps, but also apps such as TripIt, that provide all that information in one clear package so that we know where we’re going and where need to be. When we book for the best price, we might use price comparison websites like Trivago. This is a very interesting model because a price comparison website doesn’t book a room for you. It only gives you price comparisons. You have to click on the company you want to book with.
So, how does Trivago make money? Well, every time you click, it receives a commission from the person that completes your booking. After returning from the trip, we might leave a review. Travel reviews are incredibly important because they have a great influence on future travelers.
TripAdvisor is by far the largest travel review app and has recently moved into providing travel bookings. Technology surrounds the whole wheel of travel, as we call it, and is with us almost every step of the way. The way technology has transformed the travel industry means that there are now more professional opportunities for people that we didn’t see in the past. For example, how Instagram influences our travel decisions. There are influencers there that get paid for posting certain photos, ads, and videos about properties and destinations.
Google Guides is also a great way for people to review and influence other people’s traveling. Another area where technology has helped people in developing their own business ideas and becoming a part of a community is reviews. Google Local Guides is an excellent example of how people leave reviews that influence where other people go. And that might lead to professional opportunities down the line. Someone might hire you based on the reviews you have written.

Just like some people have their own private planes, other people have their own private yachts. If you want a taste of that life but you don’t have the funds to buy a yacht, there is technology that can help you including apps like GetMyBoat and YachtLife. There is a way for you to taste that life at sea.

When we think of cruise lines, there’s quite a difference between the Caribbean cruise that you might be familiar with and a river cruise. Caribbean cruises are extremely popular. So popular that some cruise lines now have their own islands. Royal Caribbean, for example, has developed an island that is called CocoCay. Cruises arrive there, the passengers disembark for the day, nobody stays there at night, and everyone goes back on the ship.

It’s a clever business model because all the money that is spent on that island goes straight back to the cruise line. There is no escaping the cruise line entertainment or food. It’s a great way to make sure that all the spending stays within the company.

Another type of cruise that has gained in popularity is river cruises. You might have seen these boats. They look quite different. Rather than the very high ships, they are flatter. They have large windows on the side, when people lie in bed, they can see the shoreline go past. It’s a really popular model in Europe and is now developing in other continents around the world.

When we think about how cruise lines make money, particularly the mass cruises like, Royal Caribbean, a lot of it actually doesn’t come from the price you pay for your room. A lot of it comes from other activities and most importantly, the casino. Because the ship is in international waters, casinos can operate freely on board. That’s one of the biggest money generators for the company as well as retail, food, and beverages. You can think of it as a modern version of the riverboats that went down the Mississippi that also had casinos on them.

Traditionally, typical travel-related companies, such as airlines, cruise lines, buses, or trains, focused only on taking people from point A to B.

Currently, there is a greater emphasis on the traveler’s experience. Safety and fuel efficiency are top priorities at the airline level. But, the in-flight experience for passengers looks more focused.

Seats are getting better. Airlines are also working to improve the servicescape. These are the factors that influence how you feel, breathe, sleep, and digest.

Airlines are emphasizing the importance of the passenger experience with meaningful changes. They are looking for an onboard lighting solution to help passengers cope with jet lag. Travelers are unable to stand often, and food is difficult to digest. Airlines are now considering thoughtful meal options to help you feel better while traveling and avoid getting overstuffed.

Are you curious about these changes? Passengers arriving for a trip or in transit between two aircraft can use the new Changi Airport terminal in Singapore. This enhancement also attempts to appeal to the local community. As a result, they’ve created a one-stop shopping, entertainment, and event destination for all travelers. Airports, for instance, are no longer only concerned with safety and efficiency. They want to make a lasting impression on visitors.

Transportation is an important component of the travel experience. It’s what gets us to our destination. The airline industry has many different service options, each offering various levels of hospitality to their customers, as follows:
* The full-service airline
These types of airlines, such as Delta or United, typically offer a variety of routes and destinations. Different seating classes are offered at different price points, including economy, premium economy, business class, and first class. These seating classes may have different seat sizes or leg room space, boarding priority, and in-flight food and beverage options.
* The low-cost airline
These types of airlines, such as Spirit Airlines, offer discounted prices and are barer boned compared to the traditional full-service airlines. There is no first-class seating, routes may be more limited, and in-flight food and beverage options may also be limited.
* The luxury airline
These airlines focus on the high-end luxury customer. They have first class facilities that are above and beyond, including cabins that have fully flat beds, personalized services, and a full meal menu with metal cutlery.
The airline Etihad takes luxury to a whole new level with their product called ‘The Residence’. Your 12-hour flight becomes even more luxurious in your own apartment on the plane, complete with a small living room, a bedroom, and even a shower.
* Charter flights
With charter flights you negotiate the price for the entire plane. Package tour operators such as Thomas Cook and TUI will charter a plane for their guests.
Technology has also supported the development of the chartered airplane industry. Apps such as Fly Victor, NetJets, Blade, or Wheels Up allow you to book your private plane or helicopter as simply as you book an Uber.
* Private jets
Some people have their own private jets, which is realistically not within reach for everybody. If you need or want a private jet for a particular trip, a charter flight may be your better option.

What makes the Uber’s. Birds, Turo’s, and Air BnB’s of the world stand out in their innate ability to offer unparalleled experiences for consumers. People have discovered ways to monetize off everything: plots of land for one-of-a-kind glamping experiences, relatively unused real estate, and even personal cars that can be rented to travelers. Whatever the case, the sharing economy has become an effective avenue to give consumers an off-the-beaten-path or one-of-a-kind experience, directly from consumers for consumers. This has changed the game for the travel, tourism, and hospitality industries.
Due to the localization of the experience on sharing economy platforms–individuals now have the upper hand when it comes to offering something unique, anywhere and anytime. You can set your own parameters to be matched with the exact amenities you are looking for; a hot tub, 10 bedrooms, nearby a grocery store, ski-in ski-out access. Renters can tap into unused potentials–such as capacity–to help others, and in doing so help themselves through the extraction of money from said space or thing.
You can’t book a one-of-a-kind place in most traditional hotels–they all look the same. Hotels are built to be standardized and are relatively singular in offerings. The way traditional hotels are structured makes it incredibly challenging for them to offer a truly genuine type of lodging experience. Due to this major economic shift, hotels are forced to rethink their strategies in terms of offerings and customization. Some hotels are moving towards allowing customers to book a specific room in a given hotel, though that room will likely be very similar to another room in the same property.
With all that being said, safety and security are often overlooked when it comes to the sharing economy– something that hotels offer that the sharing economy can’t, yet. While there are rating systems that give you a sense of security on whom the buyer is and what others have experienced when interacting with that buyer’s good, home, or service, it is hard to assess overall safety when actually utilizing whatever said customer has rented. How do you know who’s sleeping in the apartment next door? How do you know the area is safe in general? These are answers you can’t really find via these sharing platforms. While the hospitality industry needs to play catch up on unique offerings, the sharing economy needs to rev up their security and safety metrics.

What made all of this development happen was—and Amazon and Google were part of it, but other companies are also part of it—is the move towards the cloud. Cloud-based data and transactions enable things today that you couldn’t do when the cloud didn’t exist.
Back then, you had to store data in many locations. Now everyone can store data in the cloud. As a result, companies like Google and others can use artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other sorts of capabilities to mine the data and really get to a granular level of understanding of the entire wheel of travel.
That’s what makes it happen. It’s the cloud, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. You can expect to see several new jobs emerging from that in the future, not only in terms of data mining or engineering but also jobs at the property level.
Marriott launched the internal capability of mining its loyal customer’s social media to understand what is happening in their lives so that when they get to a property, Marriott can personalize the experience.
Think about someone posting a picture and saying, we’ve just had an anniversary. We celebrated our son’s 10-year anniversary, and we’re taking a vacation down to Florida. We stayed at Marriott.
Marriott knows at the property level that your kid had celebrated its 10-year anniversary. They can tailor the amenities they will leave in the room, or they can tailor the welcoming that they give you. Say, “Hey, welcome. By the way, we are glad you’re coming here for your 10-year anniversary.” That’s the level of personalization you can expect at the service delivery level, but also during the entire planning phase in the coming years.

It isn’t only Airbnb. Other brands have attempted to enter the sharing space—the sharing economy for lodging.

Oasis Collection is one of them. Oasis has attempted to accomplish something similar to Airbnb by utilizing unused capacity. They’ve attempted to design it in a manner that is distinct from Airbnb. While Airbnb tries to offer any type of rental goods, Oasis has defined the kind of product they want to sell on their platform, which is why they call it the Oasis Collection.

Another intriguing aspect of Oasis is the variety of destinations available. They also strive to build a member club where individuals can go if they rent one of their products in a specific location. So, for example, you might rent a curated apartment in Marbella, Spain. Marbella is well-known as a hotspot for nightlife enthusiasts. So you’d go there, rent the Oasis apartment, and at the same time, you’d be able to go to the Oasis club once a week for an all-night party. And you’re only permitted to visit because you’ve rented an Oasis.

Another notable feature of that concept is those apartment owners who rent on Oasis are also club members. If you’re an owner who puts your property on the Oasis platform and your apartment is in Marbella, Spain, but you’re traveling to Paris, you can enjoy the club in Paris because you’re an Oasis Collection owner. As a result, they’ve attempted to build a community of owners and guests who prefer to utilize curated apartments rather than Airbnb-style services.

From healthier options to gourmet burgers, fast casual is changing the way we eat and think of food and is taking business from well-known fast food chains.

The restaurant business is responding to some consumer trends better than others. One key trend is healthy eating. A good example is the whole category of fast-casual, which is eating business away from traditional fast food.

Why? Because consumers want healthier options.

They want more choices. They also don’t want to go to a traditional restaurant during lunchtime, sit down for an hour and a half and wait for someone to serve them.

When walking down Broadway from 42nd down to the 23rd, there are about 20 new restaurant concepts. Just by observing, many of them are based on salads. There’s a green wave and the consumer wants fresh, innovative salads. That’s a key growth segment.

You also have a gourmet burger. Shake Shack is a good example of that. It’s not necessarily a gourmet burger, but it’s a much better burger that you can get in McDonald’s. Then if you take bread-based companies, like Panera, which dominates the category, there are other players but they’re not even close to as big as Panera.

Panera understands that consumers want freshly baked bread with innovative combinations, not the traditional ham and cheese. They also make good salads and soups, and it’s pretty fast.

You can use technology, especially here in Manhattan. You can order, pay online, and then just go pick up, or they can do delivery.

Talking about trends in Mexican, Chipotle owns that category. If you consider the ingredients that they have, there are about a couple thousand options that the consumer can choose from through this combination of a dozen or so ingredients.

Again, it’s fresh. The ingredients are fresh. It’s prepared right there in front of your eyes. It is not something that happens in McDonald’s where it’s prepared behind the counter, and it’s always the same standardized. You have more flexibility and better ingredients.

Fast-casual is taking business from the casual family restaurants, the TGI Fridays of the world, and the fast-food players like McDonald’s, Burger King or Wendy’s.

Let’s take a closer look at mega events and the hospitality industry. These events help with long-term regeneration and can transform a city for the better.

We’ve talked about some events and how important it is to coordinate between different stakeholders. But some mega-events change cities as a whole.
The Olympics are a key example. When the Olympic games are hosted the planning process starts a decade in advance. Cities have to apply to become host cities. They have to put in an application document.

They also need to start building the venues and the Olympic Village where the athletes will need to be housed. In some cities, there will be reorganizations in terms of transport infrastructure. We see that some cities approach this as a vehicle for long-term regeneration-so in other words, a vehicle for long-term change and new prosperity to different areas.

The London 2012 Olympics were a great example of this. They were hosted specifically in East London, an area that was, for a long time, seen as an ugly, polluted, former industrial area and where nobody wanted to build or live. So it was a bit of wasted space in a major city. What the Olympics did was inject a lot of investment in that area.

There was an entire soil cleansing process. All the old industries that were located there had left heavy metals in the soil, creating a very polluted area. The whole area was cleaned up and if you look at it now, it’s almost unrecognizable. None of that investment would have happened had the Olympic Games not come to town.

Sometimes, the event itself is much bigger than the two weeks that it takes place.

You have the Olympic Games. You have the Paralympics. And in principle, then everything is over. But the lasting effects of an event for a city can be much, much more significant.

A lot of events—like sports events or art events—really wouldn’t be possible without sponsorship. What we see is that private companies will invest to have their brand logo displayed or to have advertisements during the event so that their brand is connected to the brand, or the event itself.
At the Olympic games, major sponsors might be, for example, McDonald’s or Samsung. They invest a lot of money so that their product is aligned with the value of the event itself.
This can also happen in much smaller events. For example, there might be a local food festival where you live, and there might be local restaurants or food companies that sponsor that. Ticket sales, of course, are a major factor. Hopefully, you can sell enough tickets to raise the money that you have invested into staging the event.
There are other ways, particularly if you work in the arts. You could tap into government funds. There might be an application process so that you can host your event for the sake of the greater good of the community. That’s where local governments often invest.
They often do that because of the tourism impact it might have. You might attract people to the event that will spend money and thus bring benefits to the community. Maybe your event has other benefits. Maybe you have a community sports event that promotes healthy living or healthy eating, and the government wants to support it.
If we think of the venues where these events might take place, some of the main stadia in New York City you might well be familiar with. Think of Madison Square Garden or Radio City or the Barclays Center, but don’t forget that a lot of events also take place outdoors. For example, the New York City Marathon ends at Central Park, or the US Open, a tennis tournament, takes place at Flushing Meadows. Other famous examples would include Yankee Stadium and MetLife Stadium.