Every year, the world's largest travel trade show, ITB in Berlin, Germany, showcases future travel trends. One trend topics is new travel mobility with pilotless passenger drones, supersonic airplanes or Elon Musk's Hyperloop.

The fair presented an international market study in cooperation with the travel portal Travelzoo. More than 6,000 travelers from Europe, the U.S. and Canada were surveyed on the topic of "The Revolution in Travel: Means of Transportation of the Future. Respondents' expectations for 2030 are clear: more than half expect autonomous cars, one in three expect electric planes and supersonic jets, and nearly one in four expect air cabins. At the same time, however, one in five is still skeptical that mobility will change at all.

There is a clear willingness to use the new forms of travel: just under half of those surveyed chose the Hyperloop as their preferred means of travel in the future, 35 percent said flying cars, and 19 percent said drones. It is interesting to note that the generational gap in responses is particularly pronounced in the case of passenger drones. While a quarter of respondents in the 18-34 age group can imagine drones as a means of travel, only 13 percent of those over 65 are very skeptical about them.

Why the travel industry needs mobility innovation?

The exponential growth of traffic, combined with the resulting environmental problems, makes the original concept of mobility obsolete. Mobility is associated with concepts such as independence, freedom, individuality and self-determination. However, as a result of these developments, mobility today is seen as inefficient, critical and problematic.  

As an example, consider developments in air travel and automobile travel. In 2006, there were just over two billion air travelers worldwide. This number has doubled to four billion passengers today (as of 2018) and will increase to eight billion by 2036 (data from the International Air Transport Association, IATA). The road traffic situation also illustrates the growing number of travelers: there are about 1 billion cars on the roads worldwide today. This trend will continue to grow until 2050, but with varying intensity depending on the region. According to the Beijing Traffic Management Bureau, 1,466 new cars were registered every day in 2009.

Besides infrastructure and congestion problems, both forms of transportation share the biggest common problem: environmental problems. The latest ITB/Travelzoo survey illustrates this point. When asked about the future of flying, the most important criterion cited was the use of green fuel in vehicles. The same applies to the advantages that respondents see in the new forms of travel: in addition to "faster travel" and "less travel stress", "environmental friendliness" and "the tendency to be less dependent on resources" are mentioned. With electric vehicles, the decarbonization of transportation is already one of the central themes of future mobility and will become even more dominant in the future. Digitization also plays a key role, as it is essential for all future mobility technologies.

Future Trends in Mobility

The following list provides an overview of the most important future technologies or projects and their status quo in the field of mobility:  

• Fully Automated Driverless Vehicles: Driver assistance systems have been standard in the automotive industry for years, but fully automated, driverless vehicles are considered the key technology of the future. The current state of the art allows autonomous driving without any monitoring or intervention by the driver. However, this has only worked well in test environments or under ideal conditions. Vehicles are not yet able to handle complex everyday traffic situations. Questions of ethics, safety, and insurance remain unanswered. In addition, the legal situation has not yet been defined: While the U.S. is a pioneer in terms of approval and legislation, the legislation in Europe has not yet been sufficiently clarified.

• Air cabs, passenger drones, and flying cars: These generic terms encompass various types of flying machines, most of which operate according to the same flight concept: vertical takeoff and landing similar to helicopters, flight with or without a pilot, and purely electric propulsion. Well-known companies such as Volocopter (Daimler participation), Elevate (Uber) or Pop.Up Next (Volkswagen in cooperation with Airbus) have already presented their version of air-cab prototypes. The strong presence of such prototypes at this year's Geneva Motor Show is just one indication that the passenger drone is seen by many manufacturers as the means of transportation of the future. Most companies have set a timeline of 2020 to 2025 for commercialization. With this technology, the speed of implementation will depend heavily on regulations and air traffic control in densely populated areas, in addition to safety issues.

• The Hyperloop is a high-speed transportation system based on the pneumatic tube concept. Using a magnetic levitation train, travelers can be transported in a vacuum tunnel at speeds of up to 1,125 kilometers per hour. The initiator of the Hyperloop is the entrepreneur Elon Musk (founder of Tesla, SpaceX). According to Musk, the Hyperloop should not only be faster and more environmentally friendly, but also cheaper than traveling by train.
  
  
• Supersonic trains, such as China's "Hyperflight" project, are expected to surpass the Hyperloop's speed. Developed by China's space agency, the train accelerates up to 4,000 kilometers per hour in an airless transport tube and could connect China to Europe. For now, the project is just an idea. The technical difficulties associated with extremely high speeds are still too great in practice.
  
  
• 13 years after the demise of the Concorde, supersonic aircraft are once again a topic in aviation: On the one hand, the U.S. space agency NASA has ordered a supersonic jet from the U.S. defense contractor Lockheed Martin that can fly without a sonic boom. On the other hand, the U.S. start-up company Boom Technology (with financial support from Virgin millionaire Richard Branson) is developing a new supersonic commercial jet with a speed of Mach 2.2 and lower fuel consumption than the Concorde. Both NASA and Boom Technology expect the aircraft to enter regular service in the mid-2020s.

Travelers' acceptance of new mobility technologies

Whether and how quickly new mobility technologies actually become part of everyday life will be determined first and foremost by public acceptance, in addition to the problems already mentioned, such as safety or traffic regulations. From a purely technical point of view, some of the transportation options described are already possible, and some are already in use. A driverless train in London (the Docklands Light Railway, DLR) has connected the east of the city (including London City Airport) with the center since 1987. At Frankfurt Airport, an equally driverless shuttle train connects the two terminals.

The ITB/Travelzoo study mentioned at the beginning of this article was specifically aimed at this relevant criterion for the acceptance of new forms of travel. However, when asked about their confidence in driverless technologies, only 25 percent of respondents answered positively. About a third are not yet sure, but the majority have no confidence at all. Strikingly, 80 percent of respondents are not willing to pay more for the new modes of transportation. This willingness is lowest for driverless systems. The four percent of respondents who are willing to pay more would be most likely to pay more for Hyperloop or supersonic trains.

The challenges to traveler acceptance are the same as they were 200 years ago with the introduction of the diesel engine or 125 years ago with the invention of the automobile. They are to increase user confidence in the new transportation options and to overcome fears. Of course, the new technologies must make travel safer, cheaper, more comfortable, and more environmentally friendly. The travel revolution requires investment not only in the technologies themselves, but also in communicating the messages. Trust, familiarity, security and cost reduction will be key to communicating the future of travel.

Conclusion

The means of travel of the future will be determined by how travelers "best" get to their desired destination. "Best" does not necessarily mean "fastest. While speed will be important for business travelers, the means of travel will be used even more as a mobile office solution. Autonomous cars, in particular, could increasingly fulfill their social function as third places. In the coming decades, a trend toward deceleration, toward a slow culture, can be observed in leisure time and thus in travel in general. Autonomous driving, for example, would minimize the stress factors of car travel; the traveler would already be relaxing on the way to the destination.