What will the consumer landscape look like in 2030?

The most advanced and ambitious future technologies will do much to complement traditional travel-agents by helping them qualifying choices based on our preferences and manage inputs of vastly greater complexity than any system we can imagine today.

Personalised Guidance

On the human concierge side, an entirely new class of professionals may emerge to help us repackage the dazzling array of choice out there into more comprehensible ‘bundles’ of choices. Part data scientist, part lifestyle guru, they will encapsulate a broader repositioning of agency action in the travel sector, the main role of which will shift from providing information to offering personalised guidance.

These technologies will tastefully mediate between our desire for a sense of control over our decision-making, and the fact that the amount of choice available is naturally overwhelming.

At the same time, we will be able to make decisions based on more nuanced and unusual preferences. We will be able to make or outsource searches based on more sophisticated grounds than those we see today. ‘Open question search’ and ‘Exploratory search’ will help us get closer to expressing intentions which are too complex to express concisely or are beyond words entirely.

Algorithms

Algorithms will steer us based on what we have seen, what we have encountered, how we have felt, or a powerful combination of all of these elements. This revolution in info-retrieval might look like a search box, but smarter, or it might more closely resemble ‘Artificial Intelligence’. However it may work, it will help us collapse the divide between the holidays inside our heads and those recorded in our Facebook albums.

Social Media will remain a key aspect of the consumer landscape and the Tweet will establish itself firmly as a de facto global currency by 2030. Readily quantifiable online social capital will be measured to assess candidates for jobs and personalise pricing. Most will use their online network-building to supplement their incomes; some will have no income aside from what they can do online for themselves, or for paying clients.

To thrive in this new consumer landscape – it will be crucial to understand the emerging traveller types – which you can learn more about in our Future Traveller Tribes reports. What do you think the consumer landscape will look like for travellers by 2030? Tweet us with hashtag #Tribes2030 to let us know.