My, how hotels have changed. Those of you of a certain vintage will remember how they were. I'm not referring to the likes of the Ritz, but to the holiday hotel of yore, the first recollection of which I have is from the year that England won the World Cup. It was called, may still be for all I know, the Yelton Hotel in Hastings. I'm guessing that they considered this to be a home from home type of family hotel. They were quite wrong. By that time we lived in comparative luxury. Not every part of our home, all furnishings, all walls, all everything smelt of beef lunches. In fact, none of it did, unlike the hotel. Nor did we have Double Diamond on tap, and we most certainly did not have an "entertainment" room which failed to entertain.
Three years later came the great foreign adventure. Arenal. Here was something different: the outdoor pool, for example, which contrasted greatly with the one in Bournemouth during 1967's Summer of Love. Buried in the bowels of the hotel edifice, plunging into it gave the impression that one might disappear into the centre of the Earth. They're probably still hunting for small children even now. Arenal was therefore several notches up on the sophistication ladder, despite there having been a shanty town as a bedroom view.
Sophistication is the keyword. The holidaymaking client nowadays requires sophistication. It comes in different guises, and the appreciation (or not) of its level of sophistication does rather depend on the punter's aspirations and expectations. Generally speaking, though, Mallorca and everywhere else are straining every hotelier sinew to invest in sophistication. Take the infinity pool, for example. Whereas the pool in Bournemouth in 1967 could seemingly oblige by condemning one to an ever-downward-spiralling vortex of infinity, the 2017 model is just infinite on a horizontal plane. Where does it go? What a clever trick.
Although there are still hotels trapped in a 1970s' time warp, the great majority now conform to the demands of 21st Century Tourist Man (and family). Spas are ubiquitous, chill-out zones are de rigueur, wifi has replaced the Double Diamond by being on tap and may well be transmitted by the contemporary beer tap, given the ominous and mysterious advance of the Internet of Things. It is the latter which defines this new age of the hotel experience. Technology has advanced sophistication as much as any competitive threat from Turkey and elsewhere.
The leap is as gigantic as it has been rapid. Back in the day when some people were on the pitch, thinking it was all over, the Yelton's technological aspirations could stretch no further than the telly in the telly room. Harold Wilson may have been announcing that there was a white heat of technology, but here was the tepidity of technology, if that.
Hotel technology took an age to embrace the age of technology. Since its relatively recent discovery, however, it has moved ahead with boundless energy, powering energy-efficient systems through the computations of software, marketing offers in a constant whir of Big Data profiling, converting the real to the less real - virtual reality.
How far can all this go? The possibilities presented by technology create a new infinity, virtual reality being just one aspect but a highly tantalising one. There were those who might have scoffed when some years ago I presented a vision of hotel virtual reality entertainment (Miley Cyrus was being virtually reproduced), but scoff no more.
I am not a futurist. Perhaps I've missed a vocation and the possibility of raking in shedloads purely on the basis of blue-sky thinking, as my vision of hotel robotics and virtual Miley bears a certain similarity with someone who is a futurist and who presumably doesn't come cheap.
James Canton used to work for Apple. He has advised more than a hundred companies as well as the White House. And what does James envisage? Among other things, the current-day theme hotel will be transformed into an immersive environment. Guests will experience live events and interact with them in real time or through virtual reality. In other words, the themed hotel becomes a virtual environment, capable of drawing on imagery from wherever, such as the past. In my vision, that past imagery was of the guest being shown how resorts once were, when guests left their compounds and did things like going to a bar.
Robots, says James, will be programmed in such ways to make guests' stays exceptional and personalised experiences through the provision of information, service and entertainment. And that is not a great distance away from my RepBot and making available virtual Miley entertainment.
Infinite. The possibilities are infinite. Perhaps the re-creation of the past might even be of plunging into the infinity of the Summer of Love.
Showing posts with label Virtual reality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Virtual reality. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 18, 2017
Wednesday, November 09, 2016
The Slow Death Of The Holiday Brochure
It was one of those annually exciting times. Off you went to the travel agents and back you came with armfuls of brochures. Hours would then be devoted to poring over their contents. Families would come together to select their favoured destination and hotel. Groups of friends would argue over the merits of one place or another. Others had no intention of going anywhere. Brochures were the closest they got to velvety white sands, turquoise seas and hotels that may or may not have actually been built.
The holiday brochure has the feeling of the past. It is somehow symbolic of the days of Cliff Michelmore and Judith Chalmers; of the days of holiday innocence and inexperience. If the brochure said there was a sea view, then it was accepted that there would be. Only on arrival did the hotel turn out to be a mile from the coast with other hotels in the way blocking what little view there might have been.
Eventually, consumer law was to bring to an end the misrepresentation. Brochures became more reliable and they also became more exotic, as did the destinations on offer. No more was it a straight fight between Mallorca and the Costa Brava. This additional lavishness spawned greater sophistication and an endless supply of imagery and verbiage. Brochure talk and brochure views demanded velvety white sands, crystal clear waters, turquoise seas. There are those - and not just brochure writers - who insist on using such hackneyed descriptions. The brochure views, depending on the market segment, also required smiling, happy families splashing at a water's edge; couples looking at each other adoringly as the sun set and the wine glass was filled; and for the youth there were riotous scenes of wet t-shirt contests.
All this talk, all these views became clichés. Destinations were indistinguishable. What mattered was the standardised marketing: families were all like those in the brochures, the children never older than ten; the couples were firmly middle-class and well-heeled; youth was boisterous but never with its arse hanging out of its shorts. They could have been anywhere.
Somewhere along the line came emotion. This represented an upping of the touchstone stakes. Thomson's 2011 telly ad with the line "holidays are the most precious time of all" did this more brilliantly than ever: it was marketing genius. Against this background, far better conveyed by audiovisual media, the brochure started to become less and less relevant. Its uni-dimensionality, its absence of interactivity, its sheer antiquity was making it redundant.
And redundant is what it is due to be, at least where Tui and Thomas Cook are concerned. Both plan to phase out brochures by 2020. They have for some while cut back on their printing and distribution in any event. Cost has been one reason; the inflexible nature of print is another. A consumer world consumed by multimedia no longer responds to the brochure in the same way. The tourist-consumer wants prior experience of what holiday experiences can be expected. It is no longer sufficient to explain how many square metres a room might have. The tourist-consumers want to be able, for example, to see what this means, and rightly so: how many people can actually conceive what x amount of square metres really represents?
A form of virtual reality is now to replace the brochure. Tui will "digitise" some 600 agencies in the UK so that the consumer, courtesy of high-definitiion technology, can "live" the destinations that are being offered: resorts themselves as well as hotel interiors and exteriors. It all makes total sense to do so and to therefore dispense with the brochure. There is no need for the velvety-white sand written cliché; the actual cliché, its very existence, can be confirmed in a virtual environment. Brochure copywriters are to be made redundant, and not before time.
But anachronistic as the brochure may be, should it pass totally into tourist marketing history? Old technologies, old ways of doing things have stubborn habits of persisting and indeed of making comebacks. Think vinyl, for example. Downloads cannot aspire to match the mystery of the LP cover, the smell of the cover and the hugeness of 33 rpm. Newspapers have yet to succumb to the threat of the internet; likewise books have staved off the advances of Kindle. People, consumers continue to have a taste for the physical, and this isn't simply a generational thing; the young take to vinyl partly because of its curiosity, partly because of its sound, partly because of its aesthetics.
These, however, are products. A brochure is not. It sells a product. And for any business with a view on the bottom line, the cost of sales and ultimate profit will always outweigh a nostalgic hankering for paper. The brochure is going. How many will mourn its passing?
The holiday brochure has the feeling of the past. It is somehow symbolic of the days of Cliff Michelmore and Judith Chalmers; of the days of holiday innocence and inexperience. If the brochure said there was a sea view, then it was accepted that there would be. Only on arrival did the hotel turn out to be a mile from the coast with other hotels in the way blocking what little view there might have been.
Eventually, consumer law was to bring to an end the misrepresentation. Brochures became more reliable and they also became more exotic, as did the destinations on offer. No more was it a straight fight between Mallorca and the Costa Brava. This additional lavishness spawned greater sophistication and an endless supply of imagery and verbiage. Brochure talk and brochure views demanded velvety white sands, crystal clear waters, turquoise seas. There are those - and not just brochure writers - who insist on using such hackneyed descriptions. The brochure views, depending on the market segment, also required smiling, happy families splashing at a water's edge; couples looking at each other adoringly as the sun set and the wine glass was filled; and for the youth there were riotous scenes of wet t-shirt contests.
All this talk, all these views became clichés. Destinations were indistinguishable. What mattered was the standardised marketing: families were all like those in the brochures, the children never older than ten; the couples were firmly middle-class and well-heeled; youth was boisterous but never with its arse hanging out of its shorts. They could have been anywhere.
Somewhere along the line came emotion. This represented an upping of the touchstone stakes. Thomson's 2011 telly ad with the line "holidays are the most precious time of all" did this more brilliantly than ever: it was marketing genius. Against this background, far better conveyed by audiovisual media, the brochure started to become less and less relevant. Its uni-dimensionality, its absence of interactivity, its sheer antiquity was making it redundant.
And redundant is what it is due to be, at least where Tui and Thomas Cook are concerned. Both plan to phase out brochures by 2020. They have for some while cut back on their printing and distribution in any event. Cost has been one reason; the inflexible nature of print is another. A consumer world consumed by multimedia no longer responds to the brochure in the same way. The tourist-consumer wants prior experience of what holiday experiences can be expected. It is no longer sufficient to explain how many square metres a room might have. The tourist-consumers want to be able, for example, to see what this means, and rightly so: how many people can actually conceive what x amount of square metres really represents?
A form of virtual reality is now to replace the brochure. Tui will "digitise" some 600 agencies in the UK so that the consumer, courtesy of high-definitiion technology, can "live" the destinations that are being offered: resorts themselves as well as hotel interiors and exteriors. It all makes total sense to do so and to therefore dispense with the brochure. There is no need for the velvety-white sand written cliché; the actual cliché, its very existence, can be confirmed in a virtual environment. Brochure copywriters are to be made redundant, and not before time.
But anachronistic as the brochure may be, should it pass totally into tourist marketing history? Old technologies, old ways of doing things have stubborn habits of persisting and indeed of making comebacks. Think vinyl, for example. Downloads cannot aspire to match the mystery of the LP cover, the smell of the cover and the hugeness of 33 rpm. Newspapers have yet to succumb to the threat of the internet; likewise books have staved off the advances of Kindle. People, consumers continue to have a taste for the physical, and this isn't simply a generational thing; the young take to vinyl partly because of its curiosity, partly because of its sound, partly because of its aesthetics.
These, however, are products. A brochure is not. It sells a product. And for any business with a view on the bottom line, the cost of sales and ultimate profit will always outweigh a nostalgic hankering for paper. The brochure is going. How many will mourn its passing?
Thursday, September 08, 2016
The Brave New World Of Virtual Tourism
Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" was published in 1932. It has been variously defined as a work of science fiction and of dystopian fiction. Huxley's dystopia was an ideal state (a utopia) gone wrong; its realities were those that readers would wish not to encounter. But in order to have credibility with the reader, those realities needed to be plausible. Huxley's vision was not something of pure sociopolitical science-fiction fantasy. It was wedded to its time. The "feelies" were one such aspect. At a time when "talkies" were still comparatively new, Huxley broadened the definition of sensory entertainment. He invented a form of virtual reality.
The BBC's website currently features an article in which Philip Ball discusses the notion that we all live inside a gigantic computer simulation. We are, therefore, only virtually real, as is everything around us. The idea isn't as mad as it sounds; not if you read Ball's article anyway. It does of course sound like "The Matrix", of which Huxley would doubtless have approved. Here is a dystopian vision of a reality that isn't real. Virtual.
There are scientists who are prepared to consider this theory and so therefore of super-intelligent beings who created a virtual world. The notion becomes less fanciful courtesy of quantum physics, while there are technological developments (and potential ones) that further reduce the fancifulness.
Ball observes: "Who is to say that before long we will not be able to create computational agents – virtual beings – that show signs of consciousness? Advances in understanding and mapping the brain, as well as the vast computational resources promised by quantum computing, make this more likely by the day. If we ever reach that stage, we will be running huge numbers of simulations. They will vastly outnumber the one 'real' world around us."
In the same year as Huxley's novel was published, Werner Heisenberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the creation of quantum mechanics. But that was 1932. This is now a world in which quantum computing makes virtual reality ever more all-embracing.
Three years ago I wrote an article entitled Let's All Meet Up In The Year 2030. This featured RepBots - robotic reps - and a "tourist integrated televisualisation system". A tourist could "mind set" this system into intelligent and interactive sunglasses and be free to go wherever he or she wanted to. That was three years ago. At the time I envisaged the tourist still going to a resort before experiencing virtual reality. Now, I'm less sure that he or she would need to.
A recent article by Andrés Romero ("Hosteltur", 21 August) looked at virtual reality and at its use to transmit emotions to capture potential tourist clients. While he was looking at the use of virtual reality as a means of marketing, he referred to key elements which might suggest a different type of future. These included sensory reality, a means by which someone can position him or herself in a virtual world. Huxley's feelies and notion of sensory entertainment have moved a long way since 1932.
The further the technology develops, the more imaginable become the simulations that Philip Ball refers to. Is it so farfetched to conceive of tourism virtual reality, maybe not by 2030 but at some point, removing the necessity to travel? This might seem like a dystopian view of tourism in the future, but would it be? The environmental benefits alone would be vast if physically tourists did not need to travel.
This would, on the face of it, destroy tourism economies and the travel industry, but as Romero points out a further key facet for the application of virtual reality is interactivity, by which the virtual world affords authenticity. The total tourism experience could be maintained therefore - there would still be travel, there would still be staff in hotels, owners of bars. Transactions would be retained. All through simulation. And so economies would remain. Tour operators would become super programmers of holiday experiences, the providers of the matrix. Sensory immersion, something else Romero cites, would enable the feeling of heat, the chill of the sea, the taste of the tapas.
All this may sound totally off-the-wall, but there is a further reason to consider why virtual tourism might one day exist. The threat is here in the present, but as technology advances in benign ways, so it does in more disturbing fashion and makes threats ever greater. Terrorism is the most obvious. A virtual world could remove that. The super programmers would see to it.
Huxley conceived his simple virtual reality of the "feelies" within a context of the day that was understandable to readers. Virtual reality of today is very much less understandable, though in comparatively basic ways - video games for example - it is perfectly understandable. And quantum computing might one day make it the reality. If it isn't already.
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160901-we-might-live-in-a-computer-program-but-it-may-not-matter
http://www.hosteltur.com/117649_realidad-virtual-revolucion-marketing-contenidos.html
The BBC's website currently features an article in which Philip Ball discusses the notion that we all live inside a gigantic computer simulation. We are, therefore, only virtually real, as is everything around us. The idea isn't as mad as it sounds; not if you read Ball's article anyway. It does of course sound like "The Matrix", of which Huxley would doubtless have approved. Here is a dystopian vision of a reality that isn't real. Virtual.
There are scientists who are prepared to consider this theory and so therefore of super-intelligent beings who created a virtual world. The notion becomes less fanciful courtesy of quantum physics, while there are technological developments (and potential ones) that further reduce the fancifulness.
Ball observes: "Who is to say that before long we will not be able to create computational agents – virtual beings – that show signs of consciousness? Advances in understanding and mapping the brain, as well as the vast computational resources promised by quantum computing, make this more likely by the day. If we ever reach that stage, we will be running huge numbers of simulations. They will vastly outnumber the one 'real' world around us."
In the same year as Huxley's novel was published, Werner Heisenberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the creation of quantum mechanics. But that was 1932. This is now a world in which quantum computing makes virtual reality ever more all-embracing.
Three years ago I wrote an article entitled Let's All Meet Up In The Year 2030. This featured RepBots - robotic reps - and a "tourist integrated televisualisation system". A tourist could "mind set" this system into intelligent and interactive sunglasses and be free to go wherever he or she wanted to. That was three years ago. At the time I envisaged the tourist still going to a resort before experiencing virtual reality. Now, I'm less sure that he or she would need to.
A recent article by Andrés Romero ("Hosteltur", 21 August) looked at virtual reality and at its use to transmit emotions to capture potential tourist clients. While he was looking at the use of virtual reality as a means of marketing, he referred to key elements which might suggest a different type of future. These included sensory reality, a means by which someone can position him or herself in a virtual world. Huxley's feelies and notion of sensory entertainment have moved a long way since 1932.
The further the technology develops, the more imaginable become the simulations that Philip Ball refers to. Is it so farfetched to conceive of tourism virtual reality, maybe not by 2030 but at some point, removing the necessity to travel? This might seem like a dystopian view of tourism in the future, but would it be? The environmental benefits alone would be vast if physically tourists did not need to travel.
This would, on the face of it, destroy tourism economies and the travel industry, but as Romero points out a further key facet for the application of virtual reality is interactivity, by which the virtual world affords authenticity. The total tourism experience could be maintained therefore - there would still be travel, there would still be staff in hotels, owners of bars. Transactions would be retained. All through simulation. And so economies would remain. Tour operators would become super programmers of holiday experiences, the providers of the matrix. Sensory immersion, something else Romero cites, would enable the feeling of heat, the chill of the sea, the taste of the tapas.
All this may sound totally off-the-wall, but there is a further reason to consider why virtual tourism might one day exist. The threat is here in the present, but as technology advances in benign ways, so it does in more disturbing fashion and makes threats ever greater. Terrorism is the most obvious. A virtual world could remove that. The super programmers would see to it.
Huxley conceived his simple virtual reality of the "feelies" within a context of the day that was understandable to readers. Virtual reality of today is very much less understandable, though in comparatively basic ways - video games for example - it is perfectly understandable. And quantum computing might one day make it the reality. If it isn't already.
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160901-we-might-live-in-a-computer-program-but-it-may-not-matter
http://www.hosteltur.com/117649_realidad-virtual-revolucion-marketing-contenidos.html
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