Accommodation
The hotels are staying where they are but more and more people opt for other kinds of accommodation. Apart from popular booking.com and HomeAway that lists flats and houses, services like Airbnb are being used a lot more often. It is quite similar to Uber in a way that every property being listed on the site is coming from different people – you can rent anything from a room to a whole house. Plus the owners might be of help with moving around!
Book on the go
Some of us are still searching for places and booking everything on laptops whilst many people do it all on their phones – easy and can be done on the bus on the way to work thus, saves time! Many booking companies now are enhancing their websites for a better mobile experience that differs a lot from computer one.
Charger always with you
This will be most exciting for girls – what we have waited for this whole time! Aspinal of London designed a new handbag with a portable phone charger inside. It comes with two small pockets for a phone and an iPad with two usb cables ready to charge your devices. A genius idea but with a biting price – £950 for this piece of magic.
Get a free phone from the hotel
Asia is always the first one to introduce new cool things to the public, this time a hotel on Hong Kong put smartphones in every room for the guests to use during their stay, which included free calls to anywhere in the world, limitless data and Wi-Fi connection. Talk about customer service!
Portable Wi-Fi hotspot
No matter how many times we tell ourselves that once on a holiday, the phone will be left in the hotel and there will be no Facebook for a week, we still start searching for Wi-Fi wherever we go. A portable pocket-sized hotspot comes in handy for such occasions. It allows you to connect all the devices anywhere you go. Travelling the world and staying connected is now easier than ever.
A new selfie stick
Don’t lie to yourself – you too indulge in the guilty habit of taking selfies. With drones it can be done even easier and no excellent photographer can do the same shots from distance above. Just check whether you need to register your drone with the authorities (America just implemented a new rule that requires everyone who owns a drone to register for a license first).
Personalized journey
Supermarkets’ loyalty cards are used to collect points but they also collect information about your regular purchases so they can send you emails with sales that might be of interest to you. Now hotels, booking sites and major tourist attractions start using the same technique. For example, Disneyland has a MyMagic+ wristband that you scan at the resort to help you navigate through the park in your own individual way.
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Virtual passports
Smart gates at the airports are not new anymore but virtual passports definitely are! Australian’s Foreign Affairs Minister proposed an idea of making cloud passports that would store all the information available on a physical one including the biometric data. This will not only make life easier for both the travellers and officers who check the passports but will also decrease the number of lost or stolen documents.
Virtual reality travelling
Looking though photos of ‘must-see places before you die’ on Facebook, liking pictures your friends uploaded from an amazing trip to Hawaii with a sad smile – isn’t that what all of us do? Magic exists – virtual reality can literally teleport you from your comfy sofa to anywhere in the world. And it will also help you choose your next destination.
Self-service
In another analogy to supermarkets, self-checkouts are not going to surprise anyone. But the technology is taking it to a new level by introducing self-services in airports and hotels. In certain places you can now drop off your luggage and put all the tags on it by yourself as well as rebooking a missed flight and lots of other things. Some hotels also allow you to check-in, check-out and do the rest in between via an app, which completely removes all interactions with staff. Easier and better, many would say, but don’t we already communicate with other humans little enough?
