What does the tourism sector have in store for us in the coming years? Once again, the International Tourism Trade Fair (FITUR) 2020 has brought together all the sector representatives to answer this question.

A total of 165 countries, more than 11,000 companies and more than 155,000 visitors have gathered at Ifema over five days, achieving historic attendance figures.

One of the key factors revealed by 2020 is the growing interest of tourism companies in business intelligence. The need to collect data is becoming essential in a context where all sectors want to offer more personalized and accurate services to their customers.

However, if we had to highlight three travel tech trends that will mark the coming months, these are robotization, the use of biometric verification systems and the implementation of voice assistants to improve the hotel guest experience.

Robotization, the main attraction at FITURTechY  

FITURTechY is the space dedicated to technology applied to the tourism sector at this International Trade Fair. A place where professionals and visitors can experience first-hand some of these latest innovations. One of the key features of this space is to showcase the "hotel of the future". According to what we have observed at FITUR 2020, a futuristic hotel involves automation and robotization.

The automation of actions, without the need for human intermediaries, implies numerous advantages:

• Greater convenience for the user
• Cost savings for the establishment
• Data recording to interpret usage trends and improve the customer experience

This automation is possible thanks to the incorporation of IoT devices, such as intelligence sockets or smart light bulbs. But also due to the possibilities offered by smart speakers users are increasingly accustomed to. Thanks to this system, guests can adjust the temperature and lighting of an instance by voice commands or via mobiles and tablets.
 

Virtual assistants, the key to Travel Tech

However, if there is one trend that will mark Travel Tech in 2020, it will be the voice assistants and chatbots implementation in tourism companies. Their assimilation among the general public is reducing the rejection that could arise when faced with the attention offered by this type of system. Thus, more and more companies are implementing these solutions in their workflow.

Hotel companies are currently the first to introduce customer service systems based on Artificial Intelligence. These multi-channel solutions enable uninterrupted customer service without increasing costs for the company. 

At the same time, this consumer trend joined the improvements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems that make these assistants increasingly "human". Thus, these virtual agents exhibit personality traits or characteristics. Such as empathy, which has a positive impact on the user's perception.

In addition to 24/7 availability, these assistants overcome the barrier of interpersonal communication, presenting scalability that allows the establishment to be more efficient. The result is greater customer satisfaction in any incident resolution, which can translate into an increase in bookings for additional services.

Boosting biometric technology

One area of concern for those using the technology is security. Many of the solutions that are being implemented to offer more secure transactions and operations involve biometric control.

Thus, in the tourism sector, the authentication of people using one of these parameters seems to be a growing trend. Therefore, it is already possible to find tools to facilitate guests' access to certain services and areas. On the one hand, facial recognition would help to identify guests, while fingerprint scanning would offer secure access to rooms and other services.

Ultimately, these disruptive technologies will become increasingly common in the hotel sector. All of these innovations will increase guest comfort, while hotels will be able to reduce human and operational resource costs.