LONDON, Sept 30 — In 10 years’ time, hotel guests will don sleep suits that can monitor blood pressure and glucose levels and lay their head on smart pillows that can provide head and neck massages.
Instead of making Skype calls to their loved ones back home, guests will be able to beam kids and spouses directly to their hotel room in holographic form. And smart showers will tell us how clean we are with light indicators and douse us with sprays of vitamin C.
These are among some of the fascinating prophecies being made in a wide-sweeping report released from Skyscanner, in which the online booking site tapped futurologists and industry experts to gaze into their crystal ball and paint a portrait of how the world will travel in 2024.
The notion of hotel rooms doubling as mini spas and health clinics isn’t so far-fetched, given that leaders in the industry are already introducing innovative services with the guest’s well-being in mind.
At the MGM Grand’s Stay Well room in Las Vegas, for instance, lighting is designed to help fight jet lag by resetting the internal clock, while shower water is infused with vitamin C, points out the report.
The shower of the future, meanwhile, may offer chromatherapeutic lighting: violet lighting to relax muscles, yellow to help with digestion or soft blue to stimulate and energize, experts predict.
Shower technology is also being developed to “agitate dirt” from our bodies and, in future, could tell us how clean we are with a lighting system that would illuminate green or red.
Likewise, sleep suits will be embedded with sensors that can monitor a guest’s health and even offer dietary advice.
The hotel experience in 2024 will also become highly personalised, allowing guests to control lighting, curtains and temperature with the press of a few buttons and swipes on their tablet device, a service that already exists at The Peninsula Hong Kong.
In fact, experts envision that guests will even be able to change the decor of their room via interactive walls that can display different desktop-like images, films and family photos via a smartphone app: think tropical beach projection in the middle of winter.
“The Future of Travel 2024” was written by a team of 56 editors, researchers and futurologists around the world. The chapter on hotel rooms marks the final instalment of the three-part report that included planning and booking and travel journeys. — AFP/Relaxnews
