Levers To Restructure Vietnamese Tourism

The new normal pace of life stimulates consumers’ desire to move, promotes the development of the tourism – travel industry, simultaneously brings challenges to forms of tourism that apply technology to keep up with the world’s trend.

Let’s go through the leading technological trends in the world that promote the innovation in the travel industry:

1. IoT – Internet of Things 

The application of IoT has created the potential to make significant changes for the travel industry recently, along with the development of 5G networks, devices can connect faster than ever. IoT data has enabled tourism businesses to understand the needs of travelers like travel habits, places of interest, preferences, and several other online search characteristics and behaviors. Thereby, companies can offer travelers personalized tours and also convey potential customers the information they are interested in. Experts from the Spanish Institute of Hospitality Technology (Instituto Tecnológico Hotelero, or ITH) confirmed that IoT is an effective tool and key factor to enhance the personalized customer experience in the coming years. In addition, the application of IoT technology will help tourism businesses increase efficiency during overall operation, save time and money.

2. Blockchain 

Blockchain has many potential uses in the tourism sector. First, the decentralized nature of blockchain allows easy tracking of baggage transported during the journey. Second, it can provide a means for secure and traceable payments. It can also be used to store customer information and use that information to improve identification services at airports, which can help reduce check-in and queue times. Blockchain can be a support tool in loyalty programs, from simplifying the management process to making it easy for customers to check information about rewards, or use tokens.

3. Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) technology 

Virtual reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) are already emerging technologies in many different fields, but their role in the tourism industry is particularly important. AR and VR technologies allow users to experience more authentic visited places. Along with the development of the trend of virtual tourism, the application of this image enhancement technology provides customers with a new and unique travel experience, anywhere, anytime.

This is one of the most promising technology trends for companies involved in the travel industry, because it allows them to digitally transport customers to a virtual recreation of a specific location. This gives hotels the opportunity to feature rooms, reception areas, and even local tourist hotspots on their websites, to entice guests to book. Other examples might include interactive virtual maps or VR hotel tours/360 video tours for hotel presentations.

4. AI Chatbot

The combination of AI and Chatbot is not too strange in the digital transformation era. AI Chatbot can interact with humans through text, audio or both, and simultaneously appear on websites, mobile applications, and smart speakers. The advantages of Chatbots in the travel industry are fast response speed, 24/7 support, personalized travel recommendations, highly and successful booking rates, multilingual functionality, customer feedback analysis, etc. The chatbot allows users to book flights, rooms and self-locate to choose the best travel recommendations. The Chatbot development trend will help businesses build their brands, forecast customer needs and thrive in the quality and service of their businesses.

5. Recognition Technology

Identity technology is also one of the most important tech trends on this list, as it removes friction from purchases and makes interactions seamless. This technology includes fingerprint recognition, face recognition, retina scan and many other biometric identifiers.

This technology is already used in some hotels to allow guests to enter rooms via fingerprints or to allow customers to check out without informing the front desk. In the future, however, it is hoped that the technology could allow customers to pay for meals in a hotel restaurant simply by walking through the exit.