Futurist Gerd Leonhard - The Future Of Travel: TIS Seville 2022

So. Good morning. I'm sorry. My Spanish is very basic. I will try to use a couple of words in between and speak a little bit slower. I live in Zurich, in Switzerland. I have a casa in Lanzarote, not too far from here. So I try to learn Spanish all the time. I work as a futurist. What do you say in Spanish? Futurologo. I don't know that exists in Spanish. But I'll speak to you about this topic. It's really important to realize that we're moving into a future where technology is everywhere. But at the same time, it is important for us to stay human. Because if you're looking at the reality, many people have more relationships with the screen than they have with people already. And if you're 15 years old today, you don't even know what it means to be without Internet. You grow up in a digital world. You have always been connected. If you're 35, you still know a world without Internet, but if you're 15, you don't. And I don't know if that's good or bad. But one thing is for sure, you will not find happiness on a screen. What you find on the screen is called hedonism. It's the nice, it's good to have. But really what humans want, as we know, are the humans, relationships, experiences. And that's what travel is all about. We don't travel because it's efficient. Travel is not efficient. We waste things when we travel. It's just like when we eat food, we eat real food. We could eat food from a tube, like the astronauts, but we eat real food because it's part of the human experience. So I'll talk about what that means and where that's going. Let's start in the beginning. The purpose of looking at the future is not prediction. It's actually quite impossible to predict the future. Some people have been good. Alvin Toffler, Buckminster Fuller, Arthur C. Clarke. But generally speaking, it's really important to observe the future. The purpose is not to predict, but to be better prepared. And I can't tell you there isn't any more time than to be more prepared than today, because the next 10 years will leap into the future. Science fiction is becoming science fact. Today you have on your mobile phone all the music you can want using Spotify or Apple or whatever. Many of you, I'm sure, have Spotify. 64 million songs are in here for €10. That's like science fiction. Very soon we'll be able to use the mobile phone and project the hologram, so we can talk to our mother. Well, we can already do that. It costs a million dollars, right? But in 10 years, it's normal. In 10 years, I can speak to the wall and say, please show me the best, the most interesting adventures in Spain. And the computer will show me a story. I mean, all of these things are happening. It's really important that we develop what I call the future mindset. You have to pay attention to the future so that you can be successful in the present. And that is because of the speed of the future. I always say, the futuro is already here. We just haven't paid attention. And if we don't start paying attention, we're going to be in deep trouble because the change happens so fast. And whoever is a little bit ahead wins. Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, one of the most successful software companies in the world, he said the other day, it's our job to get to the future ahead of the customer and be ready to greet them when they arrive. If you run a hotel or an airline or a car rental company or whatever, you have to be in the future just a little bit before the customer. That's why I can't figure out why today, not the car rental companies don't make a radical switch to electric cars. Because that's the future. I mean, let's face it, I'm 61 years old. I like old cars, big cars, you know, cars that make noise, you know, when you drive. But that's not the future. That's the past. Nobody in their right mind is going to buy a car with a gas engine in the next five years, because electric cars are going to be cheap everywhere, shared with a huge network of transportation. So it's really important that we start focusing on the future. So if we cannot answer the question, what will I do in five years? That is a problem. Whether you're running a community or whether you're setting up your own business or whether you're in a restaurant business. In five years, the world will make leaps into the future. I always say, you know, the scene from Blade runner. The next 10 years will change more than the previous 100 years. I know that sounds crazy, right? World War II, the Internet, the atomic bomb. But the next 10 years, supercomputing, 10G networks, virtual reality, nuclear fusion, unlimited energy, the switch to renewable energy, and we're talking about leaps and changes. And guess what? Spain is on top of the list of the countries where we have the most change. I will explain in a minute, but Basically, these changes are exponential. Exponential. We are leaping into the future. We're not going step by step. You know, Moore's law, Metcalfe's law, you know, if you're into math. We are jumping into the future. Not 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 in 10 years, 256. In 20 years, 1 million. Can you imagine? Our children will grow up in the world that's 1 billion times as different as today in 20 years. It's hard to imagine. 10 years ago we downloaded free music from BitTorrent or from Napster. Today we do it on Spotify. In 10 years, we can listen to any song and any movie and any book ever written in 40 languages in real time by just saying a word. Show me Harry Potter in Korean, page 47. Computer will show it in pictures too. So there are three revolutions. And the good news for travel is that travel is not something that we can stop. We can stop certain kinds of travel, like cruise ships, which is more optional. But traveling and meeting is what makes us human. It's like eating. We can stop eating, but we're human. We have to meet. We like the contact. So that's the good thing about the business. Imagine if you were a bank with a big building. People are not going to keep going to banks and buildings. The bank is here. So they're in much more trouble in the travel business. Three big revolutions, the two ones that you already know, of course, that's the past. But here's the three big the digital revolution. Everybody knows about that. I'll talk more a little bit. The sustainability revolution. Everything is going green, everything. And then the human revolution. Don't make a mistake about this. They're all happening at the same time. In 10 years, in 2030, if your company isn't green sustainable, the circular economy, giving back, you will be ignored and punished by the audience. Just yesterday we saw a record amount of revenues and profits from BP British Petroleum and from the Saudi Arabian company Aramco. 46% increase in profits for oil. In other words, the companies that are actively killing our planet, making the biggest profit ever. That will change. And our whole thinking around this is going to change. And we have to be first to adapt and see what that means. So in the digital revolution, of course we are connecting all over the world like this and we're going to keep on traveling. That's the basic rule of the future for travel and tourism. Digital, sustainable and human. And you have to invest in all of it because digital will help you to be more Efficient, to be faster, to avoid pollution, to connect with customers, to do digital marketing. Everybody knows that clearly. But sustainable means doing things completely differently. Like not having plastic bottles, banning plastic. It's a simple step. Not so expensive. Why do we have plastic bottles in hotels? We can just make water, right? We can drink the tap water in most countries. This is the key question. Many of you are this age. The millennials at Gen y between, say, 23 and 40, in a larger frame. This is what they want. They want to know why this is good, why it's happening, what they can do to get better. They. They want meaning. They don't just want money. People my age, we want money. The baby boomers, the Gen X money, career progress, simple. But people at that age, they want purpose. They want meaning. They want to know that you're doing the right thing. This is why Facebook is going away. Do you know Facebook revenue, stock market value has decreased by 50% the last few months? Nobody cares about them anymore. Nobody trusts them anymore. We want purpose. So in a digital world, this is what's happening. The world is becoming networked, it's becoming interconnected, it's becoming quantum computer 3D printing. And this is happening faster than we can watch. Your very sponsor here, Telefonica, is on the leading edge of these things, right? We're going to use AI for traffic. We're going to use it to make our news. We're going to use it to find cancer symptoms everywhere. Powerful. Of course. There's a thing that we have to think about when we look at technology. It changes our world. This is a machine that prints houses. 3D printed houses. Austin, Texas, China, also here in Spain, in China, they're printing 40 houses in one day using a machine, putting them up like this. They're ugly houses, okay, but still, you print them, right? You can 3D print meat. Sounds crazy, right? It's meat that's made in a lab from the cells of animals put into a printer. This will be the way that we eat sausages and burgers in the future. I tasted it, couldn't tell the difference. It's actual meat. It's not fake. And what's happening in construction and building right now, people are building houses like this. Reminds me of the movie Transcendence, if you've seen it. I mean, technology is making all that possible. Now we're, for example, reinventing concrete. Did you know, for every person in the world, there's 40,000 kilos of concrete that we already produced for each person in the world? I mean, it's insane, right? And we cannot recycle. Now there's companies reinventing concrete. They're from a printer. So I can print the wall and I can recycle it. Very big change. So we're moving into this future where basically the mega shifts are everywhere. And this is chapter five in my book. You can download it for free in Spanish also at Megashifts Digital, if you want, for later. You should definitely read this because it shows basically that all of the trends around us, they're moving. So we have big data, we have virtualization, we have digitization, we have simulation. They're all coming together. So I'll talk a little bit more about that. But this is huge opportunity for travel in every possible way. The only challenge for travel is there are some areas that are very hard to change. Flying cruise ships, I mean, those are big challenges that we have to tackle. But the megashifts will take care of that too. Because our entire world is going into the smart converter. Everything is becoming digital. The city, transportation, retail, farming, agriculture, banking, maybe even government. Just kidding. Becoming smart, digitally smart, smart, connected, collaborative, sustainable, agile, making a quick move and resilient. In the COVID times, we have proven that we can be agile. People are reinventing if we have reason. Now the real reason for tourism is we will never have good growth in tourism again if we don't reinvent what it is. And that's quite clear now, after Covid and now in the inflation crisis. The thing about technology, of course we have to be careful because technology isn't just good. For example, I always say we should be as connected as necessary, but not more. Technology has no ethics. It doesn't care for our feelings. If you go to an AI and you say, please solve the climate change problem to an artificial intelligence, you know what it will do if it can? Will kill all humans. The most logical way to solve climate change is to kill all humans. It doesn't know that this is not a good outcome. It's just logic. So when you rely on artificial intelligence, you have to check what it actually means. And we're going to need ethics. It's so important to use ethics when you talk about technology, because we have to make it equal. We have to have good access and we have to have norms and standards. So let's talk about big Green, the sustainability revolution. This here is a thing I found on Twitter just two days ago. We used to be afraid of Halloween. That was two days ago. Now here's a list of what we're afraid of. Did you know that 71% of kids, young people between 15 and 25, are worried about the future. I don't know your experience, but here in Spain, I think maybe a little bit better. But generally in Europe, most younger people are worried. Less work, automation, climate change, technology problems, autocrats, war. So we're moving into a world where we have to reboot how we do things. We have to reboot what we do and how we do it. Looking at this chart, you can clearly see we have great financial gains. Most people have a bit more money, but the world, the natural capital, the blue curve, is declining. Less species, less animals, less nature. In other words, in 20 years, we're going to end up in a place where most of us have a bit more money and a lot of rich people have even more money, but the planet is dying. So if you're Elon Musk, you can take your money and go to Mars, because the Earth is ending. But this is a problem because what good is it to do business when my kids are going to live In a world that's 4 degrees warmer has no point. They will have a very short life. So we have to think a little bit larger. Look at this map here. This is the map of where climate change problems will make it so hot that nobody can live there. By 2040, all the red countries. Spain is an orange country. But of course, you know what your biggest problem is? Everybody from the red country will come to Spain because it's not so hot. Climate refugees, millions of people. And here's what Antonio Gutierrez has to say about climate change. This is the UN Secretary General. We have a choice, collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands. Thank you. Thank you, Antonio. Collective action or collective suicide? I mean, this is climate emergency, right? We're talking about. This is not like five years ago. You're going to see a future where climate action is number one topic. If you don't go along with that, you are in deep trouble because people will stop, they will start disrespecting you. I think we're going to go in the future where all of these things will be vastly important. For example, with cruise ships, I think this is one of the modes of tourism that may very well not continue in the future. It's very hard to make that sustainable. I mean, let's face it, not only do we have environmental problems, we also have social, cultural, political problems with that. It's just an example of how difficult it is to change something like this. The way of consumption, bottom line really is, in my view, business as usual is dead or dying. If you still have business as usual, consider yourself lucky because it will end. Look at the car industry. We don't sell cars, we sell mobility. Look at the music business, we sell clicks on a cell phone. Look at the publishing business. We sell books on Amazon, not in a printed book anymore. Tourism, we're going to sell different things. We're going to change how that works. And guess what? The new business will be bigger than the old business. In music, 180 million people pay €10amonth for Spotify and Apple. That's almost 2 billion a month in new money with almost zero cost. But the change was painful. That's really what it's all about. So looking at this future, it's quite clear that being in the oil and gas or the coal business in the very near future will be considered criminal, because now we have alternatives. It's already cheaper to build a solar plant than a coal plant. In most countries in the world, solar price has gone down so low it easily beats coal. That's why I'm wondering why in Lancerota, you know, we have a power plant that burns fuel and coal to make electricity in a country on an island where there's more wind than ever before and more sun than ever before. But we're burning coal and gas, right? I mean, something is a problem here. So this is going to change. We're going to see a lot of pushback, a lot of new things happening here. And the airline industry, right? This is fiction from the 1950s about the future of flying. For some reason it says Air Europa on there, which of course didn't exist back then. But anyway, of course that's not the future of flying. I'm showing this because here's the problem, right? Most of the problem, CO2 from airlines is 2% of global pollution. Not so much, but quite a good chunk. It's our seventh biggest country, if it was a country. Here's the problem. Most of the CO2 from flying is done by the people who fly a lot, who have more money. People like me, like you, poor people, don't fly very much. So what we're going to see in the future is a tax for a frequent flyer. And here's a proposal, right? $40, $20 for the first flight, $270 for the 20th flight. I would voluntarily agree on this tomorrow. It cost me a lot of money. I mean, I'm offsetting all my flights. But this is not about offsetting. This is about paying what it costs and paying what you cause. Makes sense. It's a huge political discussion. What do we do with the money? Well, you know how much money we need to switch to green energy around the world? 150 trillion euros, not liras. That's serious money. But here's the great thing about this. Look at all these technologies. We have already all the keys to do the right thing. We have climate tech, we have battery storage position, agriculture. Very soon you can drive your electric car for 2,000 kilometers. So keep this in mind. Green is the new digital. You used to say we have to transform digital use big data, use the phone, whatever, right? But now it's this. Green is the new digital. You have to do both. If people come to your place and they can't use the mobile phone to look at stuff that you have, they will complain because your website is bad, right? Very soon they'll complain because you're wasting energy by turning the lights on the whole day. And people are already doing that. I mean, this is a new thing that's happening pretty much all over the place. So some global paradigm shifts. First, the millennials are coming. Many of them are here. Thankfully, they are the people who are juggling a lot of things. And the millennials are different. They will not do what we have done. Did you know that people my age, roughly between 50 and 70, we have caused 50% of the global CO2 in the last 25 years. We have done that. We have managed to boost 50% CO2 in the last 25 years. No wonder our kids are saying, what have you been doing? Are you not thinking? Now they're coming and they want this. They want us to get away from this simple progression. Profit and growth to a larger story, people. Planet, purpose and prosperity. In the very near future, you will only get paid as a CEO for your bonus. If you tick the four boxes, you will only see your stock goes up when you see the four boxes all by 2030. And that is a crucial paradigm for tourism. So other few paradigm shifts, there's too many. I will make the PDF available later. You can download and take a good look. So the millennials people, Planet purpose, prosperity and holistic thinking. Going back to Lancerote one more time. People fly the Ronsarote ever cheaper with ever cheaper hotels. But the locals aren't getting more money to work there. They can't afford to live in their houses because people are renting them on Airbnb. That's not holistic. I mean, you work like crazy. You work overtime so the tourists can come cheaper. But in the end, you have no benefit. So that is something we have to look at. And the paradigm shifts here are huge. Again, we don't have time to look at all of them. I'll just look at some of them. So we're going away from the concern about money and economy to climate. What good is a great economy if the Earth is crashing? Let's get our priorities straight. Energy, transportation, going to clean economics, being led by the public sector. That's very much the case in Spain, sometimes a little bit painfully so. Of course we're working online. Digital nomads, they're everywhere. And people are sharing work and working online. That's a great booster to a kind of a global consciousness. So it's kind of hard to believe all these changes are happening at the same time. But here's the biggest change is the Vitruvian Man. I couldn't find a woman, but goes for women too. And this is what's happening in our world. We're surrounded by technology like everywhere. It's getting worse too, or better, depending how you look at it. But here's the important part. There's a shift happening now where we're saying we want to go back to actually knowing who we are and connect with nature. That's called rewilding. You're the world to go back to the wild and reconnecting with ourselves and becoming human again. That's a trend. Very strong trend. There's already a name for this disease called nature deficit disorder. That means you don't connect with nature enough and with other people. You have too much in the device. That will not last. Makes people sick. You know, the people that use social media, the power users are the people that kill themselves most. The power users of Instagram and others are the ones who commit suicide the most. Why is that? Well, maybe part of that disconnection problem. You're not finding yourself anymore. So let's talk about the metaverse. This is the metaverse. No, just kidding. It's not the metaverse. This is a television on your nose. This is also not the metaverse. But some people think of it like this. This is the metaverse. We can be anybody, go anywhere, live anytime, by wearing virtual reality headsets. And clearly we're moving into a world. Sorry. Show that one more time. Where the key components of the metaverse are everywhere. There are five of them. Okay. Virtual reality, customizable avatars, cryptocurrencies, real time environments. This is actually really cool. You should try it. Microsoft, Hololens, Facebook, Oculus Rift. It will make you a Little bit sick because it's like flying in the simulator. But this is a pretty amazing experience. The question is, what's going to happen with travel in this? So a short clip on this.

She's talking about this. A virtual reality headset via Virtual Reality VR for short. Adrienne has spent the past year globetrotting, global pandemic be damned.

This is one of the spaces that I absolutely want to visit. It is the Chateau de Monte Cristo.

And she's not alone. While the headset makers don't release sales figures, some Facebook VR groups report that their membership has has tripled in the last year. There are an exploding number of apps and experiences.

You get the point, right? And then we have Facebook Horizons. That's a workspace. This is working with a hologram, so you can sit and you can watch stuff on the screen that's in front of you. Kind of like Minority Report, you know, where you can. Right. I mean, this would be great for lawyers, dentists, policemen, you know, judges to look at complicated things. And then education. What part of the solar system are we talking about? We can look at the solar system wearing those glasses by moving around the planets and seems mind boggling.

You could study in the Metaverse.

I think it definitely has its application. And then you see the graphs here showing the sales of virtual reality. Well, keep in mind, I was just in Morocco last week. Keep in mind that a really good headset costs half of what the average person makes, for example, in Morocco, a year. So I think this is not going to be a mainstream thing for quite some time until we get there. But the important part is humans are not machines and humans see things differently. We don't see things with just our eyes. We see things with everything, with our touch, with our feelings. The sensor experience, that's called in psychology, the single unified experience. The most advanced camera in the world gets about 2 or 3% of the human eye. And we don't just have eyes when we take a photo, we have smell in the air. And this is why traveling is safe here, because we're going to have virtual reality. People will do it for visiting and marketing purposes. But clearly this what we do with our body, we think with the body, not with the brain. Every psychologist will tell you this. It's called sensory fusion. And this is so important. Virtual reality will be something that we will do for lots of reasons, but it will not replace travel. Just like eating real food will not be replaced by eating toothpaste made from vitamins, because this is what's important. To us, it's not data. Humans like data. We want proof and facts, but it's really this. It's all that stuff, individual stuff, engagement, experiences, relationships. And it's very important that we protect this, that we go forward into a world where that's being kept safe. So some key challenges for the future. The global car industry, as you know, the black box here is combustion engines, regular gas engines. The feature of the car is not the gas engine, but the red box, which is software, services, electric cars. So people have worked for 50 years to make a perfect diesel engine. They're gone because we will not have diesel engines in the future. Everybody has announced this and very similar. It's going to be in tourism for a long time. Tourism has worked on extraction, just like the oil companies. We extract culture, we extract people, we extract experiences. We don't give much back. We bring people there and they take it. And now that's changing to creation. We're going to recreate experiences, make sure they're still there, keep them safe. And this is happening everywhere. So if you can follow the path of creation, I think that's where the future is going. Big problem. For example, like I mentioned earlier, Airbnb here in Spain, very big problem. It's time to consider the externality, the side effect, and pay what it really costs. If everybody wants to come to Sevilla or Cadiz or any other place, Barcelona, of course, on top of that list, right? To rent an Airbnb, they should pay a culture tax to keep the locals there. I think it makes perfect sense. Maybe not for politicians, but here we are. We want to retain the culture and we finally have to involve the communities in creating the value that people take when they go there. That's called circular thinking to give back. And that is the future of tourism in so many ways. The unthinkable will be the new normal. Carbon tax for flying, carbon tax for eating meat. I'm not a vegetarian, but we're going to see a carbon tax for eating meat because, you know, to grow a cow and then eat it takes 150 times as much CO2 as growing tofu, for example. And we're seeing all these trends happening. Basically, that is the new normal here. Already the Norwegian government is saying the biggest fjords in Norway will be closed to cruise ships that don't have battery engines. They will not allow regular cruise ships in the fjord. This will be fantastic for Sevilla. Let's not allow any more motorists with regular cars. By 2030, you cannot enter the city if you have a regular car. And this is happening in London, right? The mayor of London is a leader on this. So this is not about degrowth. I don't believe in degrowth. Humans are growing because, you know, we have kids, we get older, we do new things, we invent things, we pioneer, we go to the stars. Degrowth is not really our thing. I think what we have to think about is circular growth, putting it back. And yes, it will cost more money to do it that way. Just like plastic is cheaper than having actual glass jars in a hotel. But it will pay back. Now, the biggest airlines in the world are already saying you shouldn't fly from Frankfurt to Cologne, you should take the train. So Lufthansa has stopped offering the flight from Frankfurt to Cologne because people take the train. It's like 100th of the CO2. So very, very important we go on this future. Final thoughts and action items for you. First, number one, the world is not looking so great right now. That's an understatement. But the doors aren't closing on humanity. They're opening because now we have the technical possibilities to do things completely different. We have the money, we have the science, we have the tech to turn around climate change. We have the tech to do things better. We just have to decide to do it. And tourism, the doors aren't closing, they're just opening for a new kind of tourism. Just like in the music business. The doors on CDs and record stores close and the doors online open. And whoever gets there first will be participating. This is why we also have to change our skills. This is the reality of our work, of our world, and it won't change. Vuca. Volatile. Uncertain. Complex and ambiguous. Confusing, chaotic. What is your response going to be? You have to flip the Vuca Velocity. Speed. Unorthodoxy. Coming up with new ideas. Co creation. Good old American word, awesomeness. Sometimes when I visit a hotel, I check in there and I'm like, this is really awesome. It's not awesome because is super rich because of the style and how they do things. Just like when you go to a restaurant, it doesn't have to be the most fancy one, but it's just awesome. And the speed and your co creation, that's what really matters to us. Make no mistake about this, we're moving into a warp drive future. It's like hitting the Star Trek button. Remember Star Trek? You go off to warp drive, it's like that. We're not going step by step, we're screaming into the future. So buy yourself some ears. They're on Amazon, on sale today. No, just kidding. Can't buy them on Amazon. You have to practice listening one hour a day in the future. That's all I ask. And I'm not talking about Netflix or movies. I'm talking about reading. Here are some books to read. If you do that one hour in the future every day, you are what's called future ready. You can come up with new ideas. Everybody can do that. Doesn't take a special skill. Book number one right now is this the Ministry for the Future. Kim Stanley Robinson will give you great ideas also about tourism. Because when you have a future mindset, you will have better ideas, you will communicate better, and you will be a leader. That is the most important part. So some recommendations as to how things are going and where things are going. Point number don't go into the future based on fear. We cannot fear the future because fear will paralyze us. The future belongs to optimists. I don't want to hear any more words about saying, yes, good idea, but let's say it's a good idea. This is how we're going to do it. Let's have optimism and move beyond this kind of extracting value. Like you bring people to a beautiful island and they destroy it. And then when it's done, done, you leave. That's the all industries motto or Facebook's motto, move fast and what do you say? Destroy things. And this is why we have the metaverse today. Get to the future before your customers so you can tell your customers that you are future ready. Not with just a fancy app, but everywhere across the board. Big Blue used technology to provide new, simple, powerful added values. Don't just use technology to get a higher price for your room or your car because of some algorithm. Create value for the customer using technology. Big Green, go all out on sustainability. Don't hold back. This is very quickly going to be the standard expectation. Big human, make real things, not fake things. Don't lead people to the metaverse to meet themselves on Mars when they could be coming to your place. Focus on travelers that want to make a difference. There are a lot of them. Don't chase the ones that don't care unless you don't care. This is something that we should look at together. Finally, as I say in my book, we have to embrace technology but not become it. When you become technology, you are a commodity. The price will go to zero. Staying human is actually what brings the price up. That's the premium as we are humans. So let's go to the good future together. Watch my film, thegoodfuturefilm.com it's also available in Spanish. Buckminster Fuller, my favorite futurist, said, we are to be architects of the future, not its victims. And I think that's the most fitting summary for the future of tourism and travel. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you.