Travel Innovation

Innovation has always been at the heart of travel. The great travel pioneers of the 19th century created mass-market leisure travel by packaging components together to create affordable rail trips for working class families. In the 1960s the same concept was applied to Mediterranean beach holidays, harnessing the benefits of jet propulsion technology developed during the Second Word War.

Less than 20 years after the first British passenger jet aircraft, the De Havilland Comet, entered service in 1952, commercial flights began on the Boeing 747. By the time Concorde took to the skies in 1976, the speed of passenger air travel had increased by a staggering 1,000 miles per hour in less than 25 years. Incredibly, in the 40 years since, it’s actually slowed down by 700 miles per hour. A brand new Airbus A320 has a cruising speed less than half that of Concorde.

This wasn’t supposed to happen; progress is supposed to do just that – progress! But in the case of civil aviation, after a short period of meteoric leaps forward, we’ve been going backwards. The basic mechanics of a jet airliner are the same today as they were nearly 70 years ago – a time when the few people who could afford a car were driving around in a Morris Minor. Ask any ten year old if planes are faster today than they were when their parents were born and they will all say yes; they just won’t believe you when you tell them they’re wrong.

So, if it’s not in the technology that gets you quickly from A to B, where now is the real innovation in travel? We have business model innovation from the likes of Airbnb and HomeAway, and sure, there’s distribution innovation facilitated by (and possibly soon to be delivered by) Google, but where’s the product innovation?

I’m the sort of (sad) person that finds real joy in discovering a plug socket next to a bed in a hotel room – a simple and obvious innovation when we all have phones we use as alarms, which need charging overnight. Imagine then my ecstasy when I recently found a hotel with a USB port next to the bed – a USB port! On the flip side, the last hotel I stayed in had two desk phones (I’ve not picked up a desk phone for nearly a decade) and a LAN cable. All this in a hotel that was refurbished less than two years ago!

In the absence of another big leap forward I’m happy to accept that the most satisfying travel innovations, at least for now, may have to be those of the small but perfectly formed variety – and so I leave you with my current favourite.

Tired of having his generic ‘me too’ baggage picked up off the belt in error by other absent-minded travellers, an American businessman recently contacted one of those companies that create bespoke covers for laptops and tablets, and had his own life-sized, smiling face printed on both sides of his case. No more lost bags for him.

Now that’s proper travel innovation.

This article was first published in Travel Trade Gazette on 17th December 2015