We are going to have a good look at the way business travel will be in the future. But let’s start by thinking big. Instead of guessing and extrapolating from available data, why can’t we just pop into the future and find out? It’s 115 years since HG Wells wrote The Time Machine, after all. Surely someone must have a prototype by now.
Time travel is a favourite topic of theoretical physicists, even if the phrase itself is a little too Star Trekky for their tastes. Instead, we enter a world of closed timelike curves, spacetime geometry, relativistic velocity, Gödel metrics and the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle. It’s fascinating stuff, but no one is building a time machine just yet. Stephen Hawking famously discounted the possibility of backwards time travel with, for him, a simple piece of deduction: if it exists, why aren’t we overrun with the space tourists of the future?
Carl Sagan reckoned those time travellers could be here; they are just not drawing attention to themselves. What follows is evidence that Sagan could be right. Here are three species of future business travellers you can spot now, in the adjoining club class pod, at the hotel bar and maybe in your very own company.
HUMAN SELF-POSITIONING UNITS (HSPUS)
Think about it. You come from the future and you are transported somewhere in the world in 2010. What problems will you face? First, locating yourself. Second, understanding a strange language. Third, and trickiest, how do you blend in — understand the culture, food, religion, politics and mores of the people around you, let alone hold your own in a business meeting?
You’re going to require back- up. So you’ll need, say, 32 spaceships orbiting the Earth, sending down signals that enable you to pinpoint your exact location within a few metres. You’ll need information, too: lots of it, and you need to access it immediately. This is where the spaceships come in handy again. Using their powerful signals, you can download any one of 25 billion pages of data in seconds.
You also need to get around quickly and smartly. You can’t afford to be loaded down with masses of complicated equipment. So the HSPU has one single device that can be easily concealed in a pocket or a bag. It also doubles as a receiver for contacting other HSPUs and even the ordinary humans of the present.
Let’s call it, I don’t know, a “Smartphone”.
And the spaceships have a name too: GPS satellites. The future is here, now — but there are many more wonders still to come.
Tim O’Neill is joint managing director of the Australian digital agency Reactive (it built the website for, among others, babusinesslife.com). According to him, the HSPUs are already getting even more efficient.
“As soon as later this year, rather than packing a separate carry-on just for my phone, laptop and camera chargers, my new Universal Charger will handle them all.
“In future years, hotel rooms will include wireless charging mats, where I simply rest my gizmos. Now fully charged, my iPhone will become an even more important part of my business travel. In addition to my email, calendar, internet and phone it will be my travel guide and translator.
“So when roaming the streets of Beijing after hours, my mobile displays the street in front of me overlaid with details (and ratings) of popular bars, restaurants or hotels. This is popularly known as Augmented Reality. Once I choose a restaurant for my colleagues I take a photo of the menu and have it instantly translated into English (with an audio pronunciation), ensuring I avoid… well, things I’m not used to.
When I wake the next morning, I'll return my rented clothes and settle back to enjoy the new holographic edition of business:life.”
The last bit is still to come. For now, you can tell the HSPUs by their preternatural calmness and composure wherever they are and however bizarre and stressful the situation.
Their behaviour is in contrast to the business travellers of the present, eloquently described by Anna Glover of the luxury hotel group The Dorchester Collection: “surgically attached to the BlackBerry, wake up in the middle of the night not knowing where the hell I am, Skyping with young kids at home trying desperately to keep in touch...”
The HSPU suffers from none of these traumas — unless and until he loses his iPhone. Then he goes into system meltdown. He can then be easily identified in foreign cities walking around in circles and into inanimate objects, cursing in strange tongues. Obviously an alien, then.
SUPERCHARGED MULTI-DEALMAKERS
A main strand of futurology is the Superman thesis: that, logically, a new type of fitter, stronger, more powerful people must inevitably replace the current breed. In business, this new species is already beginning to appear in the form of the Supercharged Multi-Dealmaker.
This type takes full advantage of the speed and privileges of international travel. They rarely spend more than one week in every four in their own country — whatever their ‘own’ country is: for national identity is the mark of a much earlier evolutionary stage.
While the HSPUs are often solitary creatures, proud of their independence, the Dealmaker relies on a tight and intensely loyal support network: PAs, PRs, lawyers and fixers.
We can see a prototype of the Supercharged Multi Dealmaker of the future in the figure of the former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Here is
the Financial Times describing how he, through his company, Tony Blair Associates, operates: “What gives Mr Blair’s case special bite,” it says, “is the scale and scope of his new network, the speed of its assembly, the premium placed on privacy, and [the way he combines] official duties, fund-raising efforts and his growing commercial interests.”
The Dealmakers run a highly evolved and well remunerated version of the ‘portfolio career’. They have done a Very Big Job and they now use that status to further their commercial, political and philanthropic ends.
Often there is so much blurring that the lines are impossible to see: campaigning, profile and moneymaking all converge in a splurge of public relations. These individuals have portfolio careers on a titanic scale linked to a highly evolved and scrupulously maintained personal brand. The airways of the future will see more and more ordinary business travellers ceaselessly flitting between continents with more than one agenda in their planners. They might be consultants or just successful directors and company owners with myriad side interests. As their career advances, they increasingly find themselves in the company of politicians and entertainment and sporting celebrities as well as technocrats.
THE LIFE BLENDERS
The business travellers of the present agonise about their work/life balance. The business travellers of the future will have put that nonsense behind them years ago.
They are the Life Blenders — individuals who have regained control over their lives by the simple process of accepting that their working and home lives are inextricably linked. And they’re creating a very lucrative new market with a very ugly name: bleisure — business and leisure combined.
The life-blending phenomenon was first identified by the likes of Palm and BlackBerry at the turn of the century. They looked at the success of their great rival, Apple, and saw that the new breed of business person didn’t want to be labelled as such; they wanted to be cool, not executives. So their phones, and the way they were marketed, evolved. Out went the stern iconography of the office. It was okay to download music as well as emails, family pictures as well as PowerPoint presentations.
Then the iPhone arrived; and we’re still seeing how that particular revolution will play out. Fans — too mild a word — disciples — love their iPhones for the way they give them back time. IPhones have not attracted a mocking phrase such as ‘CrackBerry’ to denote the unhealthy obsession with being in touch with the office. The life-blending iPhone users just want to stay in touch with themselves.
Life blending has huge implications for the things that surround us when we travel. And for our state of mind when we’re about it.
For decades, business travellers have told us that what they do is a chore and a bore, serious and stressful. But Leslie McGibbon of the InterContinental Hotels Group has noticed a surprising trend emerging from his company’s customer insight work: “They are beginning to admit that they enjoy business travel.”
That small observation has huge implications for a company such as IHG, owner of venerable brands such as Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza that were founded in post-war, baby boom America on a very single-minded strategy: give the weary traveller consistency, standards and a refuge from an outside world that is by turns unsafe, foreign and confusing.
That’s changed. A new generation of business people have backpacked, odd-jobbed and volunteered their way around the world in their youth. They are not the types to barricade themselves in their hotel rooms with room service and satellite TV. So IHG has launched a new concierge service — sort of human travel guides with itineraries for guests who have an hour, or three hours, or a day to experience the city. The take-up, says McGibbon, has been phenomenal.
These are not guilt-free travellers. One thing you can say for certain about business travellers of the future is that they’ll demand the same kind of good citizenship they show in their own lives. In an unpublished research paper, IHG has identified an already large minority of business travellers they call “turbo advocates” — people who think responsibility is about more than reusing the towel in the hotel bathroom. These people want to know where the cotton for the towel was sourced and how much the laundry workers are paid. Any hotel that can’t prove its green credentials is going to suffer.
Which begs the question: should the enlightened, life-blending, turbo-advocate business traveller of the future be travelling at all? They will be. Global business has much work to do to minimise the carbon footprint of its foot soldiers, but a lot of livelihoods depend on that mobility. The design critic and social theorist Stephen Bayley believes that new technology means there’s more need for human interaction, not less.
“The popular concept of the business traveller is about a generation behind the reality of contemporary business,” he says. “No one would wish to
be construed as an ‘executive’, a notion as dated as ‘de luxe’. And with money and data cheaply and instantaneously transmitted, the fundamentals of business are not based on dyspeptic men in bad suits meeting their EU equivalents in sterile hotels.
“But the more pixellated and wired we become, the greater the need for human contact. McLuhan’s fanciful vision of a global electronic village became a reality about ten years ago, but the impulse to travel to meet, to argue, to sell, to deal and, let’s not forget, go out to dinner remains. So the most important business centres are where the people are.”
So the time machine has landed. The business traveller of the future is here already: it’s just that no one has noticed.
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