Raconteurs President/CEO, Matt Dunn, on Travel Changes Over the Next 5 Years

Matt Dunn, President/CEO of Raconteurs, has created new brands to help guide the sports tourism industry back from significant revenue loss in 2020 and 2021. Here, he forecasts travel trends that will define the next five years.

Domestic travel will rule next year. We will see people exploring surrounding cities within their states, heading out on short weekend getaways, and visiting friends and family across the country that they have not seen in a year or more. Cleanliness and hygiene will stay top-of-mind, and we should expect vaccine passports will become required for international travel. All of us in the industry should continue to focus on public health protocols, as an effort to enhance hands-free experiences will put visitors at ease.

We will see the pre-virus rate of global travel continue to rise. The requirement of vaccine passports for international travel will fade over time. However, business travel will look and feel much different. It will be hard to justify, especially those direct government employees, a scenario where we are back to taking cross country flights for a day or two of business meetings. The pandemic has proven some of these meetings can now easily be organized and accomplished on Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams. While technological advancements have created a remote working lifestyle, I predict increased multi-year rentals rather than ownership and shared resources among individuals and organizations. Also, short-lived relocations will turn out to be the new style of business travel. The virus showed us how emotionally connected to travel people are.

The adoption of self-governing vehicles in large and upper-middle markets should make travel cheaper. Virtual reality will help make remote work and person-to-person connectivity more accepted. As the sharing economy grows, it is realistic to expect that wandering, flexible lifestyles will gain recognition.

Any opportunity to capitalize on the emotional attachment of consumers to travel should be sought out, especially in sports tourism. The pandemic revealed how inaccessible and imbalanced travel can be, with some opportunities only for the fortunate. That balance needs to change.