Past, Present and Future of Travel

Traveling is as old as human kind is. People always traveled to hunt and to discover new lands.

In 1841 the big boom happened with the first prepackaged tour when Thomas Cook decided to do an organized train trip for recovering alcoholics in England. I find it a little bit funny because right now many people travel to all-Inclusive and Oktoberfest to drink alcohol 24/7.

In 1974 a fraud boom happened when travelers often found themselves stranded in destinations or pay for travel and losing money because travel never happened.

Nowadays there are many kinds of travel such as leisure travel, travel to visit our friends and family, business travel, cruising, all-inclusive packages, entertainment and sports travel and the most expensive kind right now which is the space travel. For just as little as $ 1 million you can see our planet from above and yes everything is included.

At the moment the biggest one remains leisure travel.

Since nearly 1 in 2 Canadians could be an immigrant or the child of an immigrant by 2036, I figured most of you traveled at least once in your life in order to get here.

The Future Company (it is an actual name of the company based in the USA) has done research to see where the Travel industry is headed. Research was done in Mexico, the USA, Canada, UK and China. The research showed that traveling is going to be even bigger in the future because the Millennials who are now 18-36 years old tend to travel even more. The trend also shows that in the future there will be a focus on personalized services and Travel is one of leading industries in that choice. Folks want to have personalized itineraries developed just for them based on their interests and hobbies rather than getting bored on a pre-packaged tour.

Unless you were living in a bubble, you know that technology is huge right now and it only will get bigger in the future. We already use a vast variety of websites and apps that help us plan and purchase travel or even get a quick ride to the airport. We check in online or in the kiosk at the airport and get back to the country by scanning our passport without even talking to the officer. By the way, in the future there are only going to be flights from point A to point B without connections in between the destinations which will be great for those who like to book flights with tight connections and pray to the Lord that they are going to make it.

We put 3D virtual reality glasses on to see how it will feel to be in the middle of the Sahara desert or somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. This is not a Ray Bradbury book, this is a reality now and there are a lot more to come, such as teleportation of our bodies to the desired destination without spending 24 hours of our health and time in flights and airports. Also there are already hotels with holograms on the Front Desk instead of human agent checking you in. In a very far away future we also will be traveling with the speed of light to vacation in another planets and galaxies.

Tremendous growth of IT doesn’t mean that human touch will be lost because technology will bring great things to the future. However, it still will be a combination of both – human touch and high tech.