There’s a peculiar tendency – more and more people prefer to spend money on experiences rather than things. In particular, tourism is an increasingly favored hobby on a global scale. According to Statista, the market volume of travel and tourism sector is projected to amount to approximately $1,016 billion U.S. dollars by 2027. Moreover, experts predict that by that time, 74% of total market revenue will be generated through online sales. This is a direct indication of the tourism industry not going to slow down its expanse and development in the nearest future, and many involved processes are to go through digitalization. In this age of digital technologies, tourism and digital transformation are surely to go hand in hand and become more intertwined with each other. That’s what we would like to discuss with you in the article – the main digital transformation trends in tourism to expect and go by.
Digital transformation in travel and tourism: top 6 solutions
Let’s start off by taking a look at a number of the most popular examples of the digital transformation in the tourism industry.
- Booking apps. Applications for convenient bookings are among the most demanded digital transformation trends in hospitality. They let tourists book all sorts of things remotely – from a plane ticket (particularly, solutions that help you select from dozens of airlines to get the most reasonable price are hugely popular right now) to hotel numbers and museum tickets (check out the Tigets app). Obviously, this niche has quite a high level of competitiveness, so in order to really impress your TA here, you will have to come up with a unique digital transformation strategy in tourism (instead of building another faceless hospitality solution).
- Apps for local search. Despite the given niche being literally filled to the top with practically identical products, some development companies still manage to generate some significant innovation-driven hype from time to time. Thus, despite the definite popularity of Yelp among the fans of gastro-tours, such analogs as OpenRice and Trip Advisor managed to earn their ‘first million’ pretty fast. Nevertheless, we’d recommend to go beyond the restaurant theme and go for some more user-beneficial niche. For instance, you can create an app that indicates the nearest first aid posts or public restrooms (which is a huge problem for foreigners, as a matter of fact).
- Routing apps. One of the most trivial options when it comes to tourism solutions. In fact, there is an enormous number of such applications currently existing on the market – starting with world-renowned, used by millions of users globally Google Maps and finishing with less so popular products like Culture Trip and OsmAnd. Culture Trip is a landmark guide, while the latter is an offline maps solution. All in all, as you can see, it’s not that easy to come up with something authentic in the given niche. It’ll take a certain amount of effort to really impact your potential customers and gather a significant share of the audience.
- Expense planning apps. The brightest example here would be Trail Wallet and Splittr. The latter solution seems especially interesting to us – it helps large companies that travel in groups to calculate by whom and how much money exactly must be paid at a certain moment (like during a restaurant dinner or hostel numbers booking). These software solutions allow attaching your banking card data or even connect a payment gateway to make payments straight via a smartphone.
- Business trip guide apps. A great subject for a case study of this type of applications is TripIt – mobile software that integrates with the smartphone user’s email sorts all the data on the booked tickets and generates an optimal route. Busy business people whose every minute is valuable and that plan to visit several remote locations during their business trip will find such software utterly useful. You can create something like that by integrating a couple of APIs (for example, combining the geolocation data collection service with the service that grants access to the user email) in one solution.
- Hitchhike apps. Last but not least in our top digital transformation trends in the travel industry, applications used to search for fellow travelers, the most vivid example of which is an online service Bla Bla Car. As a matter of fact, despite some obvious risks (you never know whom you setting out to drive with), such products are very popular among users. Perhaps, you’ll be able to create something similar, but with more transparent customer selection.
Read more about the most common software development strategies and take a look at their benefits and drawbacks.
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