Technological innovation in the travel industry has been uneven. While some facets of the travel experience have advanced especially from generation to generation in recent times, those inventions have had to coexist with clumsy manual processes that have been slightly replaced over the past 40 years.
Now, however, the pandemic has put the industry under a serious stress test. Not only has the number of passengers fallen off a cliff since the arrival of Covid-19, but the
The passenger experience has been delayed by several decades due to increased bureaucracy and the hassle of testing, checks, location forms, quarantines, and more.
These setbacks have highlighted facets of the overseas that are no longer suitable, and a multitude of startups are already filing more convenient and frictionless reports to trap audiences to return to the global as the Covid scenario improves. It may just be the reorganization that the sector needs.
A path to contactless travel
The pandemic has highlighted the amount of human contact involved abroad and has led to radical changes in the way accommodation providers operate.
According to James Jenkins-Yates, CEO of control provider Airbnb Houst (formerly Airsorted), “Keeping everyone as safe as possible has been our priority during this time, and we have monitored to make sure some of the most important processes are controlled in a Covid-safe manner. Our visitors can register at any time safely at the properties. According to a recent Airbnb survey, it’s now the favorite option for the vast majority of visitors, so our purpose is to make sure you don’t want to meet someone before, during, or after your stay.
However, the challenge of unnecessary human contact remains acute at airports. Baggage check-in is confusing and time-consuming. Repeated identity checks are especially frustrating when you discover that the user in front of you hasn’t finished their paperwork. This is compounded in the Covid era due to the many other legal controls required through other airlines, departure and arrival destinations.
These archaic systems persist for two reasons. First, agencies try to do too much inside the airport terminal itself. Secondly, too much passenger information is trapped in partitioned systems, so it needs to be manually re-checked on a consistent basis.
However, we now see that many of those processes can be automated through pre-processing and knowledge verification, without this affecting the underlying security of operations.
Companies like Zamna are devising tactics to determine the identity, details and even fitness of passengers before they leave their homes. These technologies apply blockchain generation to digitally determine and attach siloed passenger knowledge sets between airlines, governments, and security agencies so that once inside the airport, all parties know who is who and who is where.
Remote check-in and baggage claim facilities like Airportr or DUBZ are also not unusual in recent years, removing the strain from check-in counters. However, the facilities are still expensive and lately they are used by a small minority of travelers. The next challenge for startups is to find tactics to lessen the burden on those facilities and make them more accessible/desirable for all passengers.
Resolving the rental calamity
After a long flight and a lengthy security process, the last thing that tires passengers is wasting part of an hour completing the car rental bureaucracy they already completed online several weeks before. However, even in our virtual age, the final stage of car rental adventure is still unnecessarily painful.
To solve this problem, the Parisian startup Virtuo simplified and digitized the car rental procedure so that everything was organized through an application, adding the delivery of the car at the arrivals dock. Virtual keys are used to operate the cars, allowing for an absolutely contactless queue – free experience. Audi has submitted a similar proposal, Silverautomobile, to supply premium cars to consumers in more than 10 U. S. states. In the U. S. , again providing contactless bookings through an undeniable app, with cars delivered to the customer’s location.
Elsewhere in the space, Getaround and Turo have been pushing peer-to-peer car rental in the US for more than a decade, and the pandemic has sparked a new wave of demand for these services.
Much-needed disruption to disruption management
One of the most challenging aspects of the pandemic has been the continuous changing, rearranging or cancelling of travel plans. Again, however, this is nothing new. A delayed flight or a cancellation has always caused significant problems for airlines, not to mention their unhappy customers.
Hence, it’s no surprise to see a variety of recent market entrants devising innovative ways to smooth out some of the issues caused by disrupted travel.
For example, Sparefare has created a marketplace for customers to buy or sell unwanted tickets, avoiding the need for passengers to subject themselves to lengthy refund/voucher request processes. Journera allows travel providers to get ahead of the game in the event of cancellations or delays, identifying affected passengers and allowing customer service agents to better accommodate their needs through any disruptions and transitions. And Pilota enables customers to compare flights based on their reliability and provides airlines with AI-powered predictions about how each flight will go.
Serial entrepreneur and investor Karen Hanton, founder of pet-friendly travel provider PetsPyjamas, explains, “We’ve all had to be so resourceful during the pandemic, that as we emerge the other side, we’re prioritizing flexibility across practically all aspects of life. Consequently, travel companies have had to abandon their pre-Covid conventions – they know that if they don’t have flexibility baked into their offering, people are far less likely to book with them.”
Travel insurance warnings
The prospect of disruption to overseas travel makes passengers nervous, which is why travel insurance has become a big company in recent decades. Unfortunately, too many providers have not kept their promises of protection, making the claim procedure complicated and time-consuming. , or placing hidden warnings on policies to avoid paying for many types of non-unusual outages.
The challenge came to a head during the pandemic when it was revealed that virtually none of the insurers’ policies provided Covid-compliant coverage, and the startup network duly took note of passengers’ growing distrust of classic services.
UK-based Blink now offers bespoke flight interruption insurance, giving visitors a diversity of features tailored to the nature and duration of the disruption, from access to the airport lounge to hotel rooms and money claims. French airline Koala has eased the carga. de test for disturbed passengers, making it less difficult for them to identify the eligibility of their claim and thus ensure that one hundred percent of passengers entitled to reimbursement are compensated.
Towards a decentralized future
The global travel industry has relied on intermediaries, from the travel agencies of 20 years ago to the online booking platforms of today. of the chain to reduce the supply charge.
Once again, blockchain is the generation that makes it possible, and several startups are already building a blockchain-based infrastructure to connect more providers. For example, Further could enable P2P transactions, such as bookings and invoices, directly between airlines and their business partners. Winding Tree allows airlines and hotels to distribute their products directly to agents. With its open source infrastructure, it hopes to usher in a new era of industry-wide developer collaboration.
More broadly, Jenkins-Yates argues that it’s time for the industry to break with the afterlife once and for all. “It turns out he’s desperate to get back to the ‘old normal,’ but what he really wants to address is that things will never be done the same way they were before the pandemic. The explanation for why the long term of the generation is so exciting is that we have faced the genuine limitations of the old regime.
If projects as ambitious and radical as the ones we are seeing recently through blockchain programs succeed, who knows what other trends we might see emerge in the coming years. However, one thing is for sure: the industry is still seeing the kind of technology-driven innovation that wants to drive a long-term sustainable recovery.