A lot is happening in the world of leisure as well as business travel. Mobility integration, car sharing, demand of responsive systems like Uber, are making waves in the new business model of corporate connected travel. With all these and much more, what is becoming particularly important is a connected travel which will make the bleisure trips smooth for tomorrow’s travelers. The rise for the scope and demand of seamless travel is never-ending Right from the process of thinking on where to go, to buying tickets, arriving at the airport, travelling and then reaching the final destination — everything needs to be on the plate in all the sybaritic style. Even in the case of unavoidable disruptions, these travelers will expect to be instantly informed on how it will affect them and what could be the ways to come out of such quandary situations.
Seamless travel planning
Because of the many options and decisions confronting the traveler, travel planning is becoming increasingly complex. The lack of transparency regarding the alternatives adds to the ambiguities. Business travelers spend much time and money determining the best travel plans and schedules and delays could be highly intimidating in terms of both branding and business.
Smart airports and travelling through e-visas
Travel and tourism is one of the fulcrum segments of international trade. Archaic visa applications and processing, as well as long, tiring queues at security checks and points of entry (notably airports), cost governments billions of dollars each year in lost revenue. For the Group of Twenty (G20) countries, it was estimated in 2011 that improving visa processes could generate an estimated $40 billion-200 billion in additional tourism receipts by 2015. Integrated smart visa and automated immigration processes can exploit biometric identification, pre-interviews, and e-visas to create national (or international) databases that ease the visa application procedure for international business and leisure travel.
Optimized traffic management for mega cities
It is essential to have a holistic system which will provide accurate and punctual snapshots of traffic patterns in order to address the needs of growing megacities and the rapid increase in traffic. dynamic and real-time responses like that offered by COMET which has real-time traffic monitoring infrastructure and vehicle sensors, intelligent steering, dynamic tolling, smart parking etc. is essential to improve the traffic management.
Transparent and efficient trade flows
Fragmentation of systems and lack of common documents in international trade cause significant inefficiencies and loss of revenues which is why it is mandatory to improve both B2B and business-to-government (B2G) information exchange. TATLO (Transparency and Traceability for Logistics Optimization) concept is not new and many technologies do exist but standardization and implementation is missing.
Aligning factors like multilevel governance model, global standards for data collection and transmission, alignment among stakeholders, data security, viable financing model, and step-by-step approach is essential to make it a connected travel easier in the connected world.
