Virtual Travel Is Coming: Embrace It – or Expire

Increasingly powerful computers, faster network speeds and significantly more bandwidth will converge over the next two decades to make virtual travel available to the mass market of leisure travelers, creating what could be a tremendous opportunity for travel agents.

Virtual travel is already changing business travel, as corporations and hotels install virtual meeting studios. The meeting studios approach the definition of virtual travel outlined in the book Virtual Travel: Embrace or Expire. The book was authored by Barry Shuler, former chief technology officer of Marriott International Inc.

Barry Shuler

Shuler’s definition: “Virtual travel is actually having the experience of traveling to a destination (whether near or far) without physically traveling. In other words, you would experience the destination as if you were there, without being there.”

And that includes the sights, sounds, smells, tastes – all the sensory experiences of, say, visiting Florence – right there in the virtual studio of a travel agency, or more likely a hotel or other public access building.

Shuler wrote the book, available in print and electronic forms, to encourage travel industry professionals – including travel sellers – to think about, prepare for and adapt to virtual travel before they are displaced by the trend.

Now CIO of Design Management Associates, Inc., Bethesda, MD, a commercial interior architecture and design company founded by Shuler’s wife Sue, Shuler sees a tremendous opportunity to expand the travel market by offering virtual experiences to clients who would not ordinarily think about – or afford – long-haul destination experiences.

In fact, Shuler sees an incredible upside for those who prepare for virtual travel – and a similarly dramatic downside for those who don’t.

Technology will enable a basic form of virtual leisure travel in the next 10 to 12 years, he said. Virtual travelers will probably utilize a visor that will cover both eyes and nose, along with ear buds, and a body suit to stimulate the sense of touch. 

With the addition of even more powerful software, rich content, and more sophisticated human-to-machine interface technology to stimulate the five senses, extremely realistic sensory experiences will emerge within the next 30 years, he said.

Shuler discussed his predictions for the emergence and impact of virtual travel with Travel Market Report.

What will virtual leisure travel look like?
Shuler: The likely scenario for a general traveler is they would go into a virtual travel studio and have a half-day experience of traveling to Florence, for example. Florence is ideal for a virtual trip, to see the works of art and architecture. You can appreciate them better if you feel that you are actually walking through the art gallery – if you are feeling like you are there – and not scrolling through pictures on a screen.

What would the traveler experience?
Shuler: The virtual travel experience I envision is going to enable you to experience what is actually happening in real time in the place to which you travel. It will probably be a hybrid world where you are there as an avatar walking around via software in the system, and the system is simulating for you what is happening at the physical destination in real time.

After their virtual trip, the virtual traveler would emerge from the studio, and if the studio were in a hotel and that hotel had planned the complete experience, then the restaurants in the hotel would create the cuisine from that location and deliver it with the appropriate panache. The gift shop would sell products that today you might only find in the physical destination itself.

What can travel agents do to prepare for virtual travel?
Shuler: Agents can start thinking about the ways in which they could add value to this process – and that is through their vacation planning and destination expertise.

The more likely role for travel agents, especially the small businesses, is that they will begin to convert from selling and planning only physical trips to additionally selling and planning virtual trips. They have a natural niche, because potential travelers will still need the destination expertise that travel agents have to guide them, whether it is a physical or virtual trip.

People don’t know all of what is out there and available either physically or virtually. Virtual travel will be much easier to match up with consumers based on their profile, especially for esoteric requests.

Isn’t virtual travel already available in the corporate travel market?
Shuler: One of the reasons I started thinking about this [at Marriott International] was that we looked at equipping smaller conference rooms with virtual business meeting technology that shows life-size images of the people and identical décor in all such rooms that are networked together for a meeting.

People in one studio see basically an extension of the conference table and the walls of the room on the screens in front of them. The remote attendees are life-size, and the décor is identical on the screens and in the physical room they are in. It takes only a few minutes for all participants to forget that they actually are not in the same room together.

How long have you been involved in virtual travel?
Shuler: We were looking at this six to seven years ago, when it was in its infancy. You can get a very good business experience with this technology. A two-sense experience of video and sound is really fine for business meetings.

Corporations have significantly increased virtual business meetings by adding TelePresence or Halo studios, in their headquarters and larger field locations. (HP Halo and Cisco TelePresence are leaders in this technology.) It is much less expensive, more cost-effective and has far less wear and tear on the “traveler” than doing periodic physical business trips. 

What are some of the challenges?
Shuler: There has to be a critical mass of these studios to be worthwhile, so that people can meet virtually from wherever they are, with others who may be on the other side of the globe, without having to physically travel more than a few minutes locally.

So in the early going, to have the virtual experience from the business perspective, if you don’t have a studio in your office, you would go to a hotel – which is a logical place because the hotel already has the conference space.

There probably will be dedicated businesses and locations for this at some point, and it remains to be seen if hotels will make that transformation.

Is the hassle of physical travel, especially via airlines, speeding up the development of virtual travel?
Shuler: The hassles and negative aspect of travel will definitely speed this along. From the technology perspective, however, these developments will happen whether there is virtual travel or not. And when the technology is available, the people who are really sick and tired of the hassles of travel will explicitly express their currently un-expressed demand for virtual travel.
 
If you could avoid traveling seven or eight hours to do a one- or two-hour presentation for your business after mind-numbing hours of flying or on a train – you can see how a business traveler is more productive using virtual travel technology.

If you are traveling on leisure, the time you spend seeing the sites is probably only 30% or less of your trip and the other parts of your vacation time are spent sleeping and traveling.

What is the tipping point for virtual travel to become viable?
Shuler: When people get a taste of virtual travel, demand will steadily increase. As a result, there will be revenue opportunities in virtual travel, and the necessary technology and content will be more quickly developed.

Gaming platform companies, movie studios such as Pixar and Dreamworks, hotel companies and even travel agents, especially the larger agencies and OTAs, can come together in a creative process.

In this way, all can have a piece of the pie and utilize their complementary strengths to deliver a better experience for the virtual traveler than any one entity could on its own. 

But, those in the physical travel industry today who do not embrace the change, might well expire in the new virtual travel industry.