After a 15-hour journey from San Francisco to Sydney last month, I faced the ordeal of wending my way through Australian immigration and customs. It’s a typically frustrating but expected byproduct of travel, especially during the ultra-busy holiday season ahead of us.
Except that it wasn’t an ordeal at all. Interestingly, not once did I or any of my fellow passengers interact with a human throughout the process – no security officer, customs official or anyone else in a formal capacity.
Thanks to Sydney Kingsford Smith International Airport’s trial of end-to-end biometric-enabled passenger processing, featuring facial recognition technology that compared me to my passport photo, no one handled – or even stamped – my passport. Technology shepherded me through, every step of the way. And it was fast, easy, efficient and blissful.
Every industry is being transformed by technology, but the changes to travel have been among the most dramatic. And they are strikingly obvious to – and welcomed by -- the billions of people who pass through the world’s WiFi-enabled airports, train stations, public parks and promenades, hotels and restaurants while traveling for business or pleasure.
That’s because just about everything we need is in, or can be accessed from, the palm of our hand. Thanks to advancements in connectivity, storage and processing power, smartphones have become the de facto key to searching and booking flights and lodging, arranging transportation to and from the airport, navigating security and making on-the-fly, spontaneous scheduling changes. They can even help us envision what the trip will be like, before we even arrived, thanks to digital maps and VR-enabled previews of tourist destinations. Not to mention the constant connectivity with friends and family.
But well beyond the view of the typical individual on a journey are technologies – especially those enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT) – that are refining all links of the travel value chain, from booking to operations, predictive plane maintenance to ground control. As a result, the travel experience is different, and decidedly better, today.
For instance, Travelport – a commerce platform that provides distribution, technology, payment and other solutions for the global travel industry – is leveraging HPE’s Memory-Driven Computing architecture that puts memory, not processing, at the center of its composable computing platform.
Why? Because consumers expect their travel queries to be answered immediately, and with the most updated information possible; thus, the HPE Superdome Flex in-memory computing system is rearchitecting key Travelport algorithms to help consumers explore all relevant travel options, in an instant. Response times are faster, information more accurate and operating costs have decreased – the right formula for sustainable success.
Similarly, London Gatwick – already the world’s most efficient single-runway airport -- has partnered with HPE for an IT network overhaul is increasing resiliency to disruption from power outages while gaining in-the-moment insights from advanced data analytics to further enhance the customer experience. Doing so has made the Gatwick network capable of handling the ongoing exponential increase in data required to drive future technologies, too.
And travel technology promises to get even better as data processing extends to the edge of enterprise networks, enabling lightning-fast, real-time applications. Autonomous vehicles are likely just a few short years away from mainstream, and commercial space travel – even to Mars – seems destined to happen in my lifetime.
In fact, the possibility of a Mars mission is why HPE and NASA have launched a supercomputer into space on the SpaceX Dragon Spacecraft. We’re testing the ability of the Spaceborne Computer to function in the harsh conditions of space, as a year-long mission to Mars will require sophisticated computing capabilities to cut down on communication latencies and ensure astronauts’ survival.
As these next generation technological advancements evolve from ideation to activation, the travel experience will become even more pristine and exciting.
Where shall we go next?
