The Scary Five. Scenarios for the Hospitality Industry

In 2013, Larry Mogelonsky published a thought-provoking future scenario of Hotels in 2023 as being totally dominated by Online Travel Agencies: the scenario depicts a situation in which a hotel general manager is fired by the OTA, along with his entire hotel, for insufficient market performance.

This could in fact be the outcome of a current power struggle in the hospitality market. But what else could happen if we look at a further evolution of the internet? Especially the role of the big media houses --Google, Amazon, Facebook, Youtube, Ebay--, which in view of their marketing power are already being referred to as the Scary Five?

This article (in Dutch) describes a scenario study currently being conducted about these developments. Drivers that have been identified are: net neutrality, the neutrality of search algorithms and the business model behind these companies acting as travel intermediaries.

Jeroen Oskam & Tjeerd Zandberg, "On-guest entertainment en de Scary Five. Toekomstscenario's voor de hotelindustrie". Hospitality Management 6 (december 2014), pp. 44-47.

Tourist experiences in 2050?

At the Future Forum Napoli (October 21-28 2014) I was invited to speak about future tourist experiences. I linked their development to the three drivers for the future of tourism identified by Ian Yeoman: the global distribution of wealth, the availability of resources and technology. For the characteristics of our 'experiences', I am following four developments with interest:

1. Commoditization or 'de-experiencing' as a result of declining wealth;
2. The way resources scarcity will affect the offer of 'experiences';
3. Tourist pressure on big cities;
4. The role mediahouses as Google may play in tourism marketing and distribution in the future. Will the internet be a neutral or a mediated platform? (See also my observations on Social media in 2030).

A Big Data Police State?

If you look at the long term future of social media, I do not believe that privacy is the main concern. It is of course not the best place to share those things you would not want to be public. But the larger part of 'posts' will be hardly compromising for its users.
That is, if taken separately. The long term trend in social media appears to be building search algorithms that can make sense of all these posts, and attach a meaning behind them to individual users. As Facebook developer Rasmussen explains in a BBC-interview about the value of newsfeed posts:

"It's by far our biggest data source. The engineering challenge of building a search index that can manage that volume of data is big. We're well underway to making the system scale that far - we just aren't there yet."
It means a friend searching for "Friends who like football" could identify you if you had once written something like "Come on United!" in your feed.
[...]
"There are really interesting techniques around sentiment analysis," Mr Rasmussen says, "where people try to take text and figure out whether it's someone saying they like something or don't like something.
(See: BBC News - Technology, "Lars Rasmussen: the brains behind Facebook's future")

 A few months ago, when we started an ETFI-project on the future of social media, I spoke of a scenario in which both industries and governments would adopt a more repressive attitude. The fact that social media as Twitter have created temporary openings of free speech in totalitarian countries is a matter of technical unpreparedness rather than a feature which is inherent to the new media. On the contrary: indepth indexing of newsfeed posts will be an unprecedentedly powerful tool for repressive organisations.

The future of social media

Last October 31, ETFI professor of Scenario Planning Albert Postma painted scenarions for the long-term future of social media at IPK's World Travel Monitor^® Forum 2012 in Pisa. His presentation included the opinions or visions of several international colleagues, including my own. I see two important trends. In the first place, a growing gap between different types of news consumers, with some able to access far more sources of news than would have been thinkable in the past, and others, overwhelmed by the vast offer of news, limiting themselves to 'low-cost' news (or fun, bizarre etc. news; see "In a bizarre world ...").
A second trend is growing pressure on the freedom of expression the internet in general, and social media specifically, have generated, both from commercial parties (especially the entertainment industry) and from political power.

For the other opinions, see ETFI's Youtube channel at http://www.youtube.com/stendenetfi.