Travel’s Exponential Opportunity For Your Career

We are living in an era of exponential technological innovation. From virtual reality and self-driving cars to quantum computing and Open AI, it’s an exciting time to be alive.

For those of us wanting to create and build things — and fortunate to choose where we can work — deciding where to invest time and attention is important. Change and growth is no longer incremental, so focusing in the wrong areas has exponential opportunity costs for you and what you want to create.

I suggest that as we begin 2016, you should focus your time and attention on the travel sector.

Travel is fun, and I don’t have to convince you of that. I’m writing this on a sun-kissed Caribbean beach — not missing cold, cloudy New York City at all right now. Most people love this sort of travel, but I want you to think about travel as an industry and perhaps the biggest opportunity creators and builders of all types have right now.

Travel represents a massive addressable market. More than one billion people cross international borders each year, and several times that number travel domestically. The ability to affect large-scale impact is enormous.

Travel is a huge economic force. UNWTO research pegs the tourism industry at almost 10% of the world’s GDP, and 30% of services exports. With more than a billion international travelers alone, you can do the math.

Travel directly or indirectly affects other sectors. Tourism can improve a destination’s image, attracting investment and driving development and economic growth. Done well, tourism growth creates job opportunities, increases family income and improves quality of life. The economic and social impact of travel on neighborhoods, cities, and countries is much bigger than you may initially think.

Travel is a very experiential business, with near infinite possibilities for differentiation. The world’s leading tastemakers are naturally attracted to travel and hospitality. It’s glamorous, it’s sexy, and the ideal creative canvas in many respects.

Tourism and hospitality is ripe for disruption. We’ve seen interesting innovation coming from citizenM, Marriott, Accor and others recently — but there’s much, much more to come. Greg Oates wrote about this recently in the hospitality sector, but there’s similar opportunities for other businesses.

Travel is an ideal testing ground for innovation:

• Travel heightens awareness and and makes people more engaged with their surroundings
• Travel changes perspective
• Travel is when people step out of their day-to-day and are more likely to try something new
• Travelers are an appealing demographic as early adopters
• Travelers want to share the new things they’re experiencing

If we look at the sub-segment of travel technology, it gets even more interesting…

Travel is planned carefully. Especially in leisure travel, the stakes are high. Travel is a peak experience that people save up for and look forward to, so they research extensively to make the best possible decisions.

Travel is something people love to share — which means the data opportunities are incredible. Travelers love showing off their experiences, sharing photos and other media through various digital channels. This creates a treasure trove of insight.

Connectivity is growing quickly — in both in device adoption and network availability. Travelers today are able to use technology more than ever before, and this fulfills demand for research and content sharing before, during and after the trip.

Satisfaction drives everything. Travelers today have more options than ever, and make their decisions based on reviews and photos shared by other travelers. Reputation directly drives revenue — and virtually every other financial metric in travel and hospitality. The need to design and provide better experiences is more important than ever.

There’s big money at stake. Average transaction prices are high. We’re not selling $100 sneakers here. Many travel transactions are thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. Improvements in ecommerce, loyalty and other areas have outsized returns.

We still have a long ways to go. We’re just implementing the first wave of exponential technology in the travel industry. There’s so much more left to build.

So what now?

For those of us working in travel, we have a better opportunity than ever before to attract talent from outside our industry. The best minds from technology, media, finance, and design have an ideal platform to explore and express their talents within our companies.

For those working in other sectors, look at what’s happening in travel. Take whatever you’re building that’s interesting — whether it’s big data or virtual reality or AI — and apply it to this industry. Find a company that is at the intersection of these exponential technologies, and build the future in the world’s most exciting innovation playground.

I’m excited to be at the intersection of big data, crowdsourced intelligence, and experience design as part of a team at ReviewPro — processing the goldmine of digital traveler feedback — and the growth potential is incredible.

Together, we can transform the travel industry into what it can be. Here’s to an exponential 2016.

Join me on LinkedIn and let’s do this together…