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Pen Portrait: How will Simplicity Searchers plan their travels in 2030?
Daniel Batchelor
Global Head of Corporate Communications, Amadeus IT Group
Meet Arjun. He’s a 40 year old Marketing Manager from India. Arjun’s job is stressful and exhausting, and he doesn’t get much holiday time. Every year he concentrates his savings into one two-week splurge. This used to mean backpacking or skiing with his wife, but since their first child was born in 2026, they generally take more relaxing breaks built around school holidays. Holidays for him are nothing more complicated than a chance to reset, recover from a year of overwork and burnout, and cloud gaze for a sweet fortnight.
He spends his days looking at screens, so he goes to a travel agent for a more human input into his planning. He consents to share his data – his travel history, his recent browsing history, his media habits, his quantified self outputs, his medical needs – to help form his ideal package, but the agent also asks questions and looks to probe his more nebulous motivations for travel. The approach is a mixture of talking and telepathy, and the results are so thorough and the process so simple, fun even, that Arjun is happy with the knowledge that he is paying a little extra for their commission.
The package, taking in the destination, flight, hotel, activity, entertainment, food, insurance, etc. options, is composed of hundreds of tiny customisable modules and micro-modules, right down to the lighting options in the hotel bathroom. Arjun doesn’t admit this level of granularity – fundamentally the lighting options in the hotel bathroom will have no impact on his enjoyment of the holiday, he doesn’t concern himself – so he consents for the agent to use a mixture of his best judgement, and a download of his previous experiences, to shape the holiday around his “core” decisions.
The algorithm-informed judgement of the agent is also informed by the shared data of his family, creating a set of compromises of the three sets of needs and preferences. The result is Singapore, and everything is ‘itinerised’, a nuanced mix of museum visits, and long, lazy afternoons on the beach.
They even book tables at restaurants on the shore-side. All of this is recorded in an itinerary app with a geolocation-tracking function to help him keep track of where his family are at all times when their paths diverge. He picks up the wearables for his family and the connected luggage at home, and is also given tiny, waterproof, connected markers for them to wear in case they want to abandon their devices at any point.
Interested in learning more about Simplicity Searchers? Have a look at ourTraveller Tribes 2030 report .
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