Virtual Travel: Embrace or Expire

Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1

Lift Off

2

Virtual Travel Fundamentals

3

Virtual Business Collaboration:

Better Than Being There

4

Virtual Leisure Travel

5

General Impact

6

Specific Industry Impact

7

Winners, Losers, Partners?

8

What Can We Do to Prepare?

Epilogue

For almost forty years, Barry Shuler has been a thought leader in the information technology field and a futurist focused on formulating long range technology strategies and plans for leading companies in a number of industries. Presently he is Chief Information Officer and IT Consulting Principal for Design Management Associates, Inc., a commercial building architecture and design firm his wife Sue founded in 1994. For thirteen years, prior to joining DMA in 2009, Mr. Shuler was SVP IT Strategy and Chief Technology Officer for Marriott International, Inc. In his last two years at Marriott Mr. Shuler was also SVP and Chief Information Officer of The Ritz Carlton Hotel Company, LLC., Marriottís luxury hotel subsidiary. From 20042008 Mr. Shuler also served on the Board of Directors of Hotel Technology Next Generation (www.htng.org) a hotel industry trade association which promotes the emergence of common specifications for interoperability among commercially available and custom developed hotel systems. He also served as President of HTNG from 20072008. Prior to joining Marriott, Mr. Shuler worked for more than twelve years as an information technology consultant for Fortune 100 companies and government agencies. For the first thirteen years of his career, Mr. Shuler played a variety of roles in electronic and communications engineering and information technology at Western Electric Company, Bell Laboratories, and AT&T. Mr. Shuler has been honored with numerous awards for excellence in information technology including: 2005 Information Week Top 25 CTOís, 2005 Hospitality Technology Visionary for leading the industry towards innovative business intelligence solutions, and 2007 Computerworld Premier IT Leader. Mr. Shuler has authored and been featured in numerous computing and communications articles, and has made contributions to many books on information technology. He is a popular speaker at conferences and seminars on enterprise architecture, business process reengineering, IT enabled change, IT metrics, technology convergence, and strategic planning for information technology. Virtual Travel: Embrace or Expire is the first full-length work for which Mr. Shuler is the sole author. He sincerely hopes that you will enjoy it!

Dedication

To my wife, Sueómy best friend and the love of my life. We met late in this life, but we knew immediately we were meant to be together. Thank you for your love and encouragement in this project and in everything we do.

I love you, Doll!

Acknowledgments

I have had a long career in information technology and have been lucky enough to live from the beginning of the commercial computer age to the present. Also, both as a consultant and an employee in major companies in many industries, I have had the privilege of knowing and working with the best and brightest. As a result, any list of acknowledgments will be sorely lacking.

First and foremost, my loving wife, Sue, without whom I cannot imagine what my life would be like.

To my brother Russell for his creativity and assistance on the look and feel of the book, and for his encouragement along the way. And to all my brothers and sisters, Brenda, Marie, Boyd, and Russell, for your love and encouragement at both the low and high points in my life. I love you all.

To Carl Wilson, the ultimate chief information officer, who not only was my boss at Marriott International for almost 13 years, but was and still is a good friend and confidant.

To my many friends and colleagues at Marriott. It was through my interactions with all of you that I learned what true hospitality is about. I would list you all, but the great people at Marriott would take as many pages as this book itself. I thought about all of you as I wrote this book.

To Doug Rice, chief executive officer (CEO) of Hotel Technology Next Generation, and to the board, executive advisors, and all who participate in the HTNG workgroups. You are bringing about fundamental change for the better in the way technology is applied to the challenges of the hospitality industry.

To my favorite Holly Hill High School teacher, among many great ones, Ms. Lois Hinnant. You taught me to write, the right way. You never let me get away with being sloppy and not doing any project to my full potential.

And finally, though they are gone from this reality now, to my mother, Lois, and father, Leo. They gave me the structure and commonsense approaches to life that I have applied in everything I do. I will be forever grateful to have had the best parents anyone could hope to have.

Introduction

Welcome, intrepid travelers!

If you are reading this Introduction, you probably have at least a passing interest in travel, for business or leisure. And you may be wondering what I mean by the term virtual travel.

Virtual travel is actually having the experience of traveling to a destination (whether near or far) without physically traveling. In other words, you would experience the destination as if you were there, but without being there.

Before we start, please understand that this book is not going to show how virtual travel will be done from a technology perspective. Although it does contain enough descriptive information to give you a general understanding of the how, I will not go into a lot of detail about how these technologies will accomplish what they will do. Rather, I will focus on the capabilities of the technology, and in turn, on the potential impact on how we live and work.

These implications for the physical world are the real focus of the book. That physical world, both natural and as constructed and maintained by the humans who live and work within it, will be fundamentally changed when people no longer have to physically travel to have a real travel experience, either to accomplish work or to ìget away from it allî through leisure travel.

So a key question to be asked and answered is, when an alternative emerges, what will happen to businesses, and people employed in or served by businesses, that are based on the physical travel model as we know it today? My assertion is that large chunks of that physical world, and the products and services that are delivered in the physical world, will be bypassed in the future. And when they are, if they do not adapt, they will wither and die. At the same time, incredible opportunities await existing businesses, industries, and individuals that adapt and grow as these radical changes occur. I am not necessarily tolling a bell of alarm because of negative ìside effectsî of virtual travel, but indeed, I am raising an alarm that says we must all begin to think about and prepare for these things now.

As I was writing this book, I was asked more than once, Is this a business book, or a general book that can be read and (hopefully) enjoyed by everyone? My answer has been consistent. I think of this book first as one that will be useful to business people, especially those in positions that enable them to lead and change the course of strategies for their companies. But I think this is also a book for everyone, because whether or not the reader is at the executive level of their company, someone who performs other roles within the business world, or simply someone who consumes products and services from these businesses, the coming of virtual travel will have a major impact on the world and the way we live our lives in the next 20ñ30 years.

My upfront assumption is that virtual travel will happen, and in a big way. If any of you who are reading this want to challenge that assumption, that is fine with me. Debate is healthy. But, make no mistake, this book is about raising an alarm that the status quo in all businesses, and especially travelrelated service businesses, will not continue to be viable when a certain level of virtual travel is reached. I believe the fallout from that into everyone’s daily lives will be unavoidable and significant, both positive and negative, depending on how we as individuals and a society react to it.

My hope for the message of this book is to stimulate thought and conversation about the anticipation of and reaction to these changes, not to sell the concept of virtual travel. I go into only enough detail about the concept and the technology behind it to give you the ability to visualize what it might mean to you personally, to the company you work for, and to the physical world around you every day.

1

Lift Off

Letís take a glimpse into the future and see how human interaction might change as a result of virtual reality techniques and technology being applied to travel.

At the outset, I ask this question: If you could have a travel experience and couldnít distinguish whether you were physically there or not, would you insist on physically being there? I believe that we will have such a choice to make in less than 10 years for business travel and somewhere between 20 and 30 years for a fullfledged leisure travel experience.

When I chat with people about this, they say, Of course, I would still want to go. When I ask why, they say, Well, I want to really experience the place, the people, the sights, the sounds. They say they really want to ìbe there.î They also say it wouldnít be the same if they were not physically at the destination.

But I persist, and repeat: What if you could really experience it, complete with sights, smells, touch, interaction with people and places? I donít mean experience it like watching a movie or a television program. I mean experience it as if you were thereó in the movie—where your five senses actually tell you that you are there. When they hear this, these same people begin to let their mind wander a bit more freely. They become more open to the concept and acknowledge the possibility. I hope that reading this book will open your mind to these possibilities as well.

With this in mind, you know I am not speaking of an experience of just seeing and hearing what a place is like. I am talking about virtual insertion and immersion in a destination through the technology of virtual reality, so that your body and your mind are unable to tell that you are not actually there. I am confident that this kind of experience will be possible with the combination of technology and rich media content that will emerge by 2030. And even by 2020, an incredible leap in what is possible with virtual reality technology and media content will undoubtedly take place.

If we think about the implications, even if I am only partially right in my views of virtual travel and how fast it will emerge, the effects will be farreaching. First, think of the most basic travel-related industries. Anyone who works with, supplies, or invests in airlines, rental cars, fast ground transportation, hotels, and timeshares will certainly be affected. Additionally, tourism-related industries like restaurants, historical and contemporary sightseeing, equipment rental services (e.g., surfboards, bicycles, and diving gear), and others almost certainly will feel the impact. Technology companies also will feel these tremors of change and indeed may need to fairly significantly change the focus of their product design and development activities.

Many more areas of impact will emerge also. Quite a few of these will not be intuitively obvious. They will emerge only after we are well into the paradigm shift from the majority of travel being in the physical means to a critical mass of travel being accomplished through virtual techniques.

Obviously, one of the reasons I wanted to write this book is to share my thoughts on the topic. But I am equally, if not more, interested in readersí reactions. What do those of you employed in or served by these industries think? I am hoping everyone will read this not only to understand my viewpoint but also to place themselves in my position and make their own judgments and predictions. I am a technologist, but I am also a pragmatic businessperson. As a technologist and a businessperson, I would want to read this book to see if the person who wrote it really understands technology. Then, I would say, even if only to myself, ìHeís all wet,î or, ìI agree.î If I agreed, then I would want to take my grasp of the topic to the next level. I hope this book will spur dialogue and help to place the topic of virtual travel more in the mainstream for strategy and planning professionals in the industries that might be affected.

Because of my extended professional background, I believe consultants who travel to deliver services in remote client locations are another audience who will be actively engaged in the ideas expressed in this book. Before I became chief technology officer (CTO) at Marriott in 1996, I was on the road as a consultant for a little more than 12 years, so I know first-hand the good, the bad, and the ugly of the on-the-road lifestyle.

These road warriors have long been looking for a way to effectively accomplish their work objectives without physically traveling, because over the long run the physical travel drains the life out of them. The reason I left this kind of consulting was not that I didnít like meeting new people and helping them in their businesses. On the contrary, I loved that aspect of it. I thoroughly enjoyed the fresh start and new challenges every few months within new industries and with the smart clients whom we served. Fresh, new business or technological challenges were always there to be met, which made the ìday jobî exciting.

However, after doing this every single week for