“Self-driving vehicles will, along with Blockchain, perhaps, be the next big industry-wide invention to make and break companies,” says Alex Bainbridge, founder of TourCMS, which provides online reservation, ecommerce and back office system technology to the trade. He says vehicle transport is a foundation layer service within the travel industry and includes airport transfers, car hire, city taxis and vehicle-based sightseeing.
Bainbridge told PhocusWright that replacing these services with autonomous vehicles would create major disruption to long-standing travel companies that are used to working with human drivers.
“In short: the industry's pack of cards will be reshuffled. Providers that interact with these existing services will be impacted - for example, hotels, airports and attractions. Think about it: Will hotel location remain as important in customer selection criteria if the customer is getting in and out of the hotel via an autonomous vehicle rather than walking? Will retailers sell autonomous vehicle services in the same way that they sell conventional car hire, airport transfer and tour services today? Why, then, is no one talking about autonomous vehicles in tourism?”
Bainbridge points out that, with other new technologies (such as blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, voice user interfaces etc) there is an endless supply stream of trade opinion, whether in the form of blog posts, White Papers, or entire travel industry conferences dedicated to these topics.
“Why then is it that with regard to the concept of autonomous vehicles within tourism, I haven’t seen more than a couple of blog posts and, frankly, I have been the only person talking about this topic at recent travel industry conferences?”
However, one travel industry leader who is talking about autonomous vehicles is the new Uber CEO, ex-Expedia Inc boss, Dara Khosrowshahi. He restated Uber’s plan to have flying cars zipping around US cities within ten years and robot taxis on streets within 10-15 years.
Bainbridge says: “With a timeline now on the public record from a well-resourced travel industry company and a team who can deliver, we are moving from dream stage to reality. It's action time.”
He expressed concern about the fast-changing travel landscape. “Not everyone who works in transportation will lose their job overnight, but this at least sounds like an impact that we should be preparing for as an industry.”
Which part of the industry will feel the most impact?
Bainbridge says, “My background is in sightseeing retail technology. By sales volume, sightseeing is dominated by motor vehicles. As such, I have been taking a close look at the challenges and opportunities that autonomous vehicles will bring. I believe that six key changes will take place.”
- New sightseeing opportunities: Bainbridge says travellers will be able to take totally personalised tours on demand, making existing city sightseeing tours obsolete, especially those currently by motor vehicle. “I call this an auto-tour.”
- Multi-day tours will be available as easily as day tours. “A traveller will be able to go from place A to B to C on a multi-day route. This will compete strongly with existing itinerary-based multi-day tours that specialist local tour operators currently offer.” He adds that the hotel contracts that will be used within these tours will be the OTA contracts, not local tour operator contracts, creating further OTA centralisation of hotel buying power.
- Attraction entry areas will need reconfiguring. “Car parks will become less important and can be positioned away from the attraction.” Instead new drop-off/pick-up zones will be needed directly outside attraction entrance areas.
- Private space. Autonomous vehicles will provide an alternative for private space. “This will compete with airport rest pods, hotel rooms by-the-hour and small meeting room bookings.”
- New role for the retailer. Bainbridge says that autonomous vehicle tour retailers will need to evolve to become customer profile gatekeepers. “In order to totally personalise a tour the vehicle will need to know much more information about a customer than retailers currently transfer to the provider for a tour or hotel booking. If retailers don’t evolve to handle this, autonomous vehicle tours will be booked directly.”
- Changes for hotels. Hotels will be able to retail autonomous vehicle sightseeing tours directly from the concierge (or their digital replacements), specifically programming an itinerary designed for that hotel guest. “There is interesting scope here for spending loyalty points in new ways and changing how left-luggage is handled.”
