A trends session at the TTG Luxury Travel Summit in London on Friday (7 October) revealed that just as consumers will seek fitness activities that blend entertainment and training (“entertraining”), so too will they seek travel that meets different needs and desires at the same time.

Antonia Ward, chief futurist at Stylus, said the key to understanding the future is to push yourself beyond the “either/or”.

“Clients often ask me about what’s ultimately a binary decision: ‘Do consumers want sustainability or do they want value? Do customers want curation or do they want choice?’,” she revealed.

“But we encourage the brands we work with to push themselves beyond the binary choices. Open another door, and look inside. Consumers don’t want either/or. They want both.

Consumers will also expect luxury brands in particular to play a bigger part in civic life, Ward warned.

“Consumers are asking you to stand up and speak out,” she said, citing LVMH (Louis Vuitton)’s conservation project in Chelsea, which will see it create a “pocket forest” of native trees over the next 8-10 years, as a perfect example of the “neighbourgooding” phenomenon.

Tokyo’s BnA_Wall hotel, which features a two-storey canvas wall for artists to create ever-changing artworks, was given as an example of the hospitality industry already doing this well.

Travel can also learn much from other industries including furniture design, Ward advised. “People aren’t going to stop wanting stuff, but making stuff is going to get harder and we’re going to have draw from more sources of inspiration; we have to remind ourselves how to think,” she claimed.

Ward highlighted luxury resort Kisawa Eco in Mozambique, which is 3D-printing bungalows out of sand mortar and collaborated with local designers, as setting a new standard in creative, intelligent, sustainable design. 

Travel brands must also avoid the trap of thinking only about their existing customer base, both in terms of their nationality and their age. 

Ward stressed that by 2047, Nigeria will surpass the US as the third most populous country in the world, while by 2030, one in six of the population will be over 60. 

“It’s super-easy to think about the market you already have but we have to think about the markets that are coming,” she insisted.