Two possible futures for Hotel experiences
A customised forecast I created for a hotelier
Introduction
A couple of months back I created a customized forecast for a friend. My friend was curious about the future of hospitality and the future of travel. She is a hotelier and I aimed to help her see how she could look at the way her hotel could look in the future.
Signals of the future in hospitality
These are some examples of products and services that are not widespread but look promising in the area of hospitality.
Winnow
Winnow is a food waste reduction service (product & insights)
Change: From not knowing how much waste of food your restaurant is producing, to knowing how much amount of waste, what the wasted food is, what is the waste cost and how to reduce it.
Driver: world hunger, reduce the food waste and food security problem, saving money to restaurants.
Feedr
Is a food vendor catering for groups delivered for the workplace capabilities
Change: We are going from a single delivery per food vendor to a single delivery from different vendors. From ordering all the food from one restaurant to ordering food from multiple restaurants.
Driver: Convenience, people not agreeing on what to eat.
Flyzoo hotel
A Hotel packed with the newest technologies including VR room display before booking, self check-in with your phone, using your phone as a phone key, room service provided by a delivery bot, change of the atmosphere of the room.
Change: From personal assistance to machine assistance. From service assisted to self-service. From not knowing what room I will get to know what room I will get. From using a card to operate within the hotel to use your face to operate within the hotel.
Drivers: Convenience, Business cost saving on human resources.
Hospitality forecast
Below is a fictional story based on the examples of hospitality we’ve seen above. The intention the story is to see how the Hotel industry would change if the drivers persisted
“ In 10 years the tendency for convenience, sustainability and waste reduction will be even more accentuated than today.
Will be rare to see a hotel that doesn’t consider the full cycle of their services or hotels that aren’t fully customizable.
Because of that people are able to design their own rooms and experiences without almost moving a finger. The trip will be entirely “branded” by the hotel, which means that from the departure till arriving back home the hotel is in charge of the experience.
However, the level of personalisation of the trip is making fulfilling peoples expectations very difficult. Some hotels had the idea of introducing a cheaper rate VR experience of their hotel. Many people subscribe to it because they felt it gave them almost the same result. But now hoteliers find the problem that VR is replacing their main business.”
Signals of the future in travel
Hyperloop
The magnetic train that operates in a vacuum tube, and reduces the time of a flight from 3 hours to 30 min.
Change: From longer to shorter trips abroad, from travelling with lots of people at the same time to a smaller number of people, from a more polluting mode of transport to a less polluting one, from noise pollution lower noise pollution, from isolated locations to land to having access on any city.
Drive: Business appetite, search for a faster and more efficient system to travel, global warming.
Hi fly
Is the first airlane to fly serving food without any single-use plastic items on board.
Change: From using materials to eat that pollute, to biodegradable materials, from not considering ways to be sustainable during the flight to find ways of becoming more sustainable.
Driver: Climate change, Branding and promotion.
Nemo
Nemo allows you to plan your holiday without having to constantly price compare. You give them the month you want to travel, the activities you would like to do and destination. They will find the perfect holiday for you.
Change: From having to know specifically where to go, what to do and when before selecting a journey to indicate what flavour of travel to get and being suggested dates and activities.
Driver: Different positioning among the competition, user convenience.
Travel scenario
This is 10 years in the future where the hyperloop is the primary form of transport for long-distance travel.
“I wake up in my apartment I feel things go very fast, it is all about efficiency and production. That’s why we, my wife and I decided that is time to get away from the city. Also is our anniversary.
So we ask our personal assistant to book a retreat for both of us to relax and enjoy each other company. We ask the assistant to surprise us. Other people prefer to use VR/AR relaxing experiences, but I still love getting away from the city.
Transport is more expensive than it used to be, since having a footprint it is hardly penalized by the government. We have reduced our carbon footprint, energy consumption so we are allowed to use the hyperloop at least twice a month.
I’m worried about the state of these hotels, I haven’t been to a non-automated hotel in years, I hope they remember that is our anniversary.
Non fully automated hotels haven’t done very well in the latest years. To be fair you can now transform your house in a matter of hours for any purpose or instead use VR. However, I feel I’m losing my sense of connection to the land.
Gaming, work, sex all happens in VR. All those content companies are profiting from this government sustainable restrictions. But that’s the only thing that they can do to cope, to use those artificially fabricated worlds to travel somewhere else.
Some hoteliers are assisting house makers to create real environments where people can feel like they have time away from home.
I’ll see what we get when we are there.”
What do you think? Do you agree with this future? If you don’t, how are you going to stop it? If you do, how do you want to contribute to it?
I hope this is useful.
