All the Best
As the Best in Business Travel Awards mark 25 years, the choices our readers make are more relevant than ever
This year Business Traveler celebrates the 25th anniversary of the magazine’s Best in Business Travel Awards. Since 1988, when we first asked readers to voice their choice for who does travel better than anybody else, the industry has seen enormous change. However, to say things are changing is merely to state the obvious – it’s the blinding speed of change that really grabs the headlines.
Even if the current rate of advancement levels off, think of the developments we could see in the products, services, and particularly the technology that will drive the travel experience in the coming 25 years.
Your check-in experience at the airport or in your favorite hotel will doubtless evolve; imagine biometrics that track your every move, so you are identified the minute you walk in the lobby.Your life-like holographic host can greet you by name before passing your luggage to the equally life-like robotic bellman. Or maybe you won’t carry any luggage at all – you’ll just create your wardrobe on the fly from your portable next generation 3D printer.
If all this sounds a bit like something out of The Jetsons, remember the old style Star Trek communicators? (Flip phones have already come and gone.) How about predicting an individual’s future behavior, a la Minority Report? (Turns out our‘digital exhaust’ is leaving a trail of bread crumbs in the Big Data Forest for anybody to follow.) And who could forget Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist TV? (Well, most of us – but it looks a lot like some of today’s wearable technology.)
The point is, whatever direction the travel industry and its technology take us, you, gentle reader, will be at the vanguard. Each year as you have voiced your preferences for the top products and