Underwater hotels, moon hotels and virtual holidays: The future of travel

Thinking about a new vacation spot because you’re so tired of the same old ones? Well, according to The Guardian and the flight comparison site Skyscanner, underwater hotels, moon hotels and virtual holidays are very much a possibility in 2024.

Hotels such as the eco-luxury Whitepod Hotel in Switzerland, the bubble AttrapReves hotel in France and the sculpted from ice Hotel de Glace in Canada are examples of extraordinary luxurious hotels. But, individuals do not want extraordinary anymore. They want something out-of-this-world and Skyscanner presents a glimpse of what a 2024 holiday could look like with their Future of Travel Report.

Imagine waking up in your hotel, walking towards your window for an early stretch and gazing at space as your backdrop and the spectacular “blue-green curvature of the Earth” included. The best part, you don’t have to figure out where to go on your own. In a diagram on the Skyscanner website, Siri (which we all know is the assistant that helps you with what you need on the Apple phones), presents a virtual stream to the individual’s third-generation Glyph TV. “A curated cascade of inspiring images,words, sounds and prices,” appear on the Glyph TV. Siri fills the room with the sound of waves and projects a hologram of a seascape view through panoramic windows, which show to be beneath the “crystal-clear waters of Fiji.”

The Future Laboratory’s Co-founder Martin Raymond, who has also teamed-up with Skyscanner for this report says, “The technologies mentioned are either real, being tested or undergoing prototype development.”

Technology has taken a massive role in our world today. Artificial Intelligence will begin to change again with the way we take our vacations and book flights, saysFilip Filipov, Skyscanner’s Head of B2B.

“Travel services such as Skyscanner will deploy online semantic and intuitive tools that will know your preferences: that you are a regular business traveler, that you only take carry-ons, that you always fly first-class and like to stay in a four-star hotel no more than a mile from your meeting,” explains Filipov.

If you ever watched Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century, you’ll remember the camera shot of that amazing space station where the community lived on. Because of these amazing advances in technology, seeing a hotel in space isn’t so far stretched as before. De Zeen magazine explains that Foster + Partners, a London architecture firm, has been working with the European Space Agency (ESA) to discover methods to construct lunar homes. With this four-person residence design, these lunar homes would shelter citizens from the "dramatically changing temperatures, meteorites and gamma radiation." But, with a price such as $75, 000 individuals need to start saving up.

If you don’t feel like traveling to space, or don’t have that amount of cash, you can just as easily stay at an underwater hotel. A “Sub-aquatic hotel” will be much more likely by 2024. Skyscanner’s CEO Gareth Williams says, “I suspect you would get more from it, because there is more to see down there than in space.”

So underwater tourism is seen as a higher contender than space travel. However, the “Poseidon Underwater Resort in Fiji, which was due to open in 2008, is still nowhere near ready,” Will Coldwell from The Guardian writes to his readers. An underwater hotel will be pricey, but not as high as staying on the Moon. A week at the Poseidon Underwater Hotel, when finished, would be looking at $13, 638.