Amadeus Study Sees Future Agents As Data Scientists & Lifestyle Gurus
by Marilee Crocker /A new report from Amadeus on the traveler of the future envisions an important role for retail travel professionals--even as advancing technologies and increasingly influential online networks overshadow agents in some ways.
In the 70-page report Future Traveller Tribes 2030: Understanding Tomorrow’s Traveller, Amadeus teams up with the London-based Future Foundation to examine travelers’ changing values, needs and behaviors—and the forces shaping them.
The report predicts the emergence of six traveler personalities, or tribes, whose members are defined by their common desires “for a particular type of travel experience.”
These include:
Simplicity searchers
- Cultural purists
- Social capital seekers
- Reward hunters
- Obligation meeters
- Ethical travelers
Higher level
While members of these six travel segments will be predisposed to consult retail travel professionals to varying degrees, on balance the trends in traveler motivation and behavior portend a bright future for travel agents, said Scott Alvis, chief marketing officer for Amadeus North America.
“People will be interested in all different types of experiences,” Alvis said. “And the experience is not as much about the price and how they got there.
“It’s really this focus on what am I learning, what am I contributing to, what am I doing around self-improvement, a higher level hierarchy of needs.”
Travel agents who can move with the customer in that direction will be in a position to serve them on a very different level than they have in the past, Alvis told Travel Market Report.
Forces in play
The report paints a picture of a future where travelers’ choices will be heavily influenced by sophisticated technologies that put complex algorithms to work. Travelers’ online social networks will also play an increasingly influential role.
Side by side with these developments will be the emergence of “an entirely new class” of travel professionals, described in the report as “part data scientist, part lifestyle guru.”
Tomorrow’s travelers will look to “algorithm-informed” agents for personal, customized guidance rather than simply for information, the report states.
“On many dimensions it’s a continuation of the process we’ve been going through over the last decade, with the agents moving up the value chain in the type of information and consulting that they provide to the traveler,” Alvis said.
Travel professionals who know their strengths and their passions, who stay current with technology and “have the ability to step into the social conversation” will be in a position to be “extremely helpful” to people, he said.
And those who are adept at using social media and mobile channels have “an incredible platform” to communicate that, Alvis added.
‘Option shock’
The report notes the “unfathomable amount of information” that will become available to consumers digitally, generating an overwhelming number of choices and creating “option shock.”
This in turn will drive a market “for engines and agents to condense and package choices” for consumers, so they can more easily compare options.
But there’s not just more information on the horizon. There’ll be more targeted information that is relevant––to an extraordinary degree––to the nuanced tastes and desires, both expressed and unexpressed, of individual travelers.
Highly personalized
“Algorithms will steer us based on what we have seen, what we have encountered, how we have felt . . . and indeed a powerful combination of all of these,” the report states.
This in turn will allow travel brands to create highly personalized travel offers.
At the same time, consumer-facing technology will behave more like humans, with “organic interfaces” and the ability to process natural language.
As a result, “many roles once filled by human workers will be staffed by search algorithms, robotic bellhops, cashless payment systems, virtual customer service avatars, and fluid biometric processing systems.”
Scientist & guru
On the face of it, all of this doesn’t seem to bode well for agents.
As the report states: “The most advanced and ambitious future technologies will do much the same work as traditional travel agents––qualifying choice based on our preferences.”
Yet this is precisely where the agent of the future enters the picture.
“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 personalized guidance.”
Craving the human touch
Hand in hand with increasingly sophisticated technology, the report predicts a renewed longing for the human touch that should portend well for retail travel professionals.
“Human staff, with all their bumbling idiosyncrasies, may in certain contexts provide competitive advantage,” according to the report.