By Brian Johnston
Who doesn't want to be rid of passports, credit cards, plane tickets, immigration cards, hotel key-cards and vaccine certificates? Credit: iStock
How quaint we are in 2022, bedevilled with anachronistic, misguided notions of what travel is actually about. Thank goodness quantum leaps in technology are about to solve the problems we never realised we had. Don't worry about this brave new world. Embrace it. These eight things we hate about travel will soon be gone.
VALUABLES
Who doesn't want to be rid of passports, credit cards, plane tickets, immigration cards, hotel key-cards and vaccine certificates? They will all be encoded on a microchip embedded in your finger. Just give a little wave and border gates and hotel doors will fly open. ATMs will gush money. And thanks to GPS tracking, the government will always know where you are – which will be a good thing when you go missing a finger in a favela.
DRIVING
God how we hate driving. Many a hideous hour has been passed moseying along an ocean road, up a mountain or through a national park. Many a times we've been obliged to decide for ourselves whether a passing scenic outlook merited a pause or a picnic. But technology will rescue us from such tedium. Our rental car will drive itself and decide where to stop, and we can relax and watch TikTok videos as Italy rolls by.
POSING FOR PHOTOS
Credit: iStock
Can't wait for this to be gone. We can hope that by 2037 Instagram will be as extinct as MySpace and we'll no longer need to pack our fluorescent bikinis and floppy hats and organise photo shoots in infinity pools and lavender fields. The new trend? Being yourself, so you can stand like a sack of spuds in your scruffy travel clothes and strike no pose at all. So retro. It will be like the 1960s all over again – only in colour – and just as liberating.
QUEUES
Credit: iStock
The problem with travel is that it became available to riffraff and foreigners and, before we knew it, we special folk had to wait in line to see the Mona Lisa. How we'd love to see queues long gone. But don't worry, they will be. Just leaf over $50 at the airport security check, museum or palace and skip right past them. Or pay the new $200 entrance fee to that famous monument and you'll find far fewer have-nots around. Until the uprising, at least.
SLOW TRAINS
Chugging through sunlit vineyards or along the sides of fjords on a local train: who needs it? You haven't experienced the joys of travel until you clamber into a capsule on Elon Musk's Hyperloop and get hurtled along at 1200kph. Phew, you'll be spared the sight of passing flower-filled villages and castles, and even the lakes and mountains will be blurred. After all, the whole point of travel is getting there fast. Or enriching a billionaire. Or something.
SERVICE STAFF
With robots and holograms already a reality in some hotels and cruise ships, 2037 will be a wonderful world in which everyone smiles, gives you the right information and never forgets to vacuum under the bed. Also robots, unlike pesky humans, don't need a minimum wage or tea break. At last we'll have all our first-world travel pleasures without the slightest twinge of post-colonial guilt or the need to be nice. Perfect.
REALITY
Don't know how we ever survived buses and jungles, dusty bazaars and rickety ruins. Fortunately, in 2037 we'll stay in our lounges to see the sights thanks to simulated travel experiences. Florence looks so much better on Google Earth VR. And if you do go somewhere, you'll realise how dull travel once was without augmented reality. You'll love walking through Angkor Wat with your VR goggles as digital ninjas spring out from shadowy corners.
PLANET EARTH
As space tourism hots up, we can hope Earth will be long gone as the number-one tourist destination. After all, it's becoming so overcrowded, polluted, hot and uncomfortable. Zooming into space will be a particularly heady form of disaster tourism that will allow us to peer back at our blue planet with the same fascination as Nero gazed at a fiery Rome as he fiddled. Where next? Well, the pristine, uncrowded, exotic moon and Mars await to fulfil your every tourist fantasy.
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