Skyscanner predicts that planning and booking a holiday will be as easy and speedy as buying a book from Amazon within the next ten years. The Future of Travel 2024 report launched today by the global travel site reveals what’s in store for holiday makers in the 2020s.

The report has been produced in association with The Future Laboratory and fifty-six trend experts and futurologists in the travel and tech industries. It paints a detailed picture of how breakthrough technologies will shape the global travel industry from planning and booking a holiday, right through to exciting new destinations.

In the first of the three part future-gazing report, which focuses on planning and booking, Skyscanner has identified three key emerging trends which will make the process seamless, immersive and stress-free with a trip being researched, sampled and booked in less than an hour.

Digital Travel Buddies & Wearable Artificial Intelligence
The report introduces readers to the Digital Travel Buddy, a virtual companion which uses artificial intelligence to accurately suggest and book suitable trips for the traveller of the millennium (TOM). The future, according to Skyscanner, will see wearable technology evolve from the recently launched Google Glass to a mobile device so small that it will fit onto a contact lens and can provide immediate translations, breaking down language barriers and the need to learn the holiday lingo.

Virtual Becomes a Reality
Rather than replacing holidays, Skyscanner forecasts that virtual reality will offer holidaymakers the opportunity to ‘try-before-they-buy’ by test-driving trips such as a dive on the Great Barrier Reef through technologies such as the Oculus Rift. Haptic technology, which takes advantage of a user’s touch to provide tactile feedback, will enable consumers to actually feel what they could experience during their holiday, such as the texture of the bed at a hotel or the plushness of an airplane seat.

Semantic Search
In 2024, voice and gesture controlled online tools will further help travellers book a bespoke trip based on their responses or even through facial coding algorithms that will enable search engines to read and react to human expressions and adjust results based on the user’s response.

Commenting on the report, Skyscanner’s Head of B2B, Filip Filipov says, “The travel industry has evolved a great deal over the past ten years so trying to predict what the next ten years has in store has been fascinating. With so many emerging technologies it is mind-boggling to imagine just what their impact on travel could be. This report is a sneak peek into the future and it’s only the start of the journey. We’re looking forward to revealing parts two and three later this year which will demonstrate how and where we holiday in 2024!”