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The digital revolution as some call it has brought many benefits and conveniences to people worldwide. It has certainly made travel easier and, in many ways, more interesting. Travel destinations can be explored on smartphones, information combed, and bookings made. Digital devices have unchained business people from their desks and allowed real-time communications through many online channels.

There can be little doubting that many people just love their phones. However, there is mounting evidence that using smartphones is addictive and that it can harm a persons mental and physical health. An article in The Wall Street Journal suggests that smartphone use lowers ones intellect (Carr 2017). Chang (2017) identifies the following eight (8) dangers of excessive phone use:

Injuries and accidents
Posture-related disorders
Screen fatigue
Reduced attention span
Sleeping problems
Disconnection with friends and family
Identity theft
Damage to the spine and neck
So, digital devices have their good and bad sides for people, and we can call this a digital dilemma. Undoubtedly, this device overuse is becoming a greater social and medical problem, as well as raising many human resource management issues in workplaces. Taking a somewhat more focused view, however, in what ways does this digital dilemma impact travel and travel flows?

In answering this question, one interesting opportunity that has arisen for destinations and tourism operators is the detox offer. Here, for a price, visitors or guests give up their smartphones and other digital devices for a day, weekend, or longer. For example, the Westin Paris Vendme offers detoxers the following invitation:

In these times of hyper-connectivity, The Westin Paris- Vendme proposes an extraordinary offer. As soon as you arrive, you will be invited to deposit your mobile phones, tablets, laptops and other devices in a safe at the front-office. Then, the hotel has prepared plenty of nice surprises to indulge yourself, clear your mind, relax, in other words: revitalize yourself!

The Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Manhattan, New York, offers a Digital Wellness Escape for $255-345 with spa treatments Concentrating on the head, eyes, neck, shoulders, hands and feet, this restorative treatment aims to ease the stress and strain resulting from the frequent use of digital devices.

In addition to hotels and spas, some tour operators are also offering digital detox vacations and holidays. For example, Intrepid Travel (2017) is offering a nine-day Vietnam Active Family Holiday Digital Detox with this call to action:

Log off, shut down and disconnect from tech on this nine-day adventure through Vietnam. Forget the perfect filter or condensing your journey into 140 characters this is your time to reconnect with the world around you.

Unplugged Weekends is another company offering short-break retreats that focus on living without ones digital devices. They were featured on a BBC documentary in 2014 about digital detoxing.

In summary, while many tourism marketers are encouraging people to make greater use of digital devices when traveling, others are inviting visitors to enjoy travel without their cherished tools.

ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS

Why do you believe people take digital detox breaks like those described above?
Would you take a digital detox holiday or vacation? Why or why not?
Is digital detoxing a short-term trend? Or is it destined to become a permanent aspect of society? What are the reasons behind your opinions on this question?
How can destinations and tourism businesses take full advantage of this counter-technology trend?

Bleisure is not a word to be found in any dictionary yet, but despite this it is a hot trend in tourism. It can be defined as a combination of business and leisure travel. Whereas tourism statisticians prefer to put visitors in neat boxes, the growing numbers of bleisure travelers are bound to confound the number-counters by blurring the boundaries between market segments.

The following are some of the likely reasons for the popularity of bleisure trips:

Time poverty
A concept liked by millennials
Someone else is paying for the trip (or most of it)
People may not return to the same destinations
Family can be brought along
See more of the world and gain greater knowledge
Have more and different cultural experiences
Two research studies have been completed on bleisure travel and are listed in the sources. The research by BridgeStreet Global Hospitality (2014) found that 60 percent of respondents had taken bleisure trips and another 20 percent intended to. The remaining 20 percent cited a lack of time to fit in bleisure travel. Some 46 percent add pleasure travel days on every or most trips. The major reason for having bleisure trips is to get cultural experiences and new knowledge. More than half (54 percent) of bleisure trips are taken with family members or significant others.

The Carlson Wagonlit Travel study (CWT Solutions Group, 2016) discovered that 46 percent of pleasure travel days are taken at the end of business trips, 34 percent at the trip starts and 20 percent during business trips. It also finds that younger and female business travelers are more likely to engage in bleisure travel. Frequent business travelers are less likely. The propensity to take bleisure trips increased with the distance traveled.

The bleisure idea seems to fit well with the trend for people to want authentic experiences of the cities and other places they visit, even when on business trips. These trips also seem quite compatible with using sharing economy providers such as Airbnb, Uber, and VizEat that allow closer connections with local people and communities.

Bleisure may be more of a new name for a concept rather than a new development in travel. In fact, it has been happening for several decades.

ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS

How do you feel the bleisure trend will affect travel flows in your country(My country is China)?
How should destinations take fullest advantage of the tendency to take bleisure trips?
The research indicates that millennial and other younger travelers are more likely to engage in bleisure travel. Who do you think that is so?
Should companies encourage their employees to take bleisure trips? Why or why not?

Will Technology Reduce Business Travel?
Digital technology advancements such as video conferencing seem to be a good substitute for business travel. Some examples of such web conferencing software products are Highfive, RingCentral Meetings, Samepage, Blackboard collaborate, and webinato. They offer features such as electronic hand-raising, shared whiteboard, applications sharing, presentation streaming, and on-demand webcasting. Video conferencing allows businesses to communicate face-to-face virtually, reducing the amount of money and time spent on travel.

Despite this trend, business travel is still an important growing travel segment. For instance, the number of United States business travelers increased by 1.2 percent in 2016 compared to the previous year. There also is growing recognition of the advantages of a face-to-face meeting compared to videoconferencing. One issue is that video conferencing does not allow individuals to emotionally connect with others. In some cases, individuals need to be in the other companys environment to get to know their culture better and to impress their clients. For instance, a lot of the employees at Accenture, a consulting company, still make frequent business trips because building relationships with their client in person over breakfasts and dinners is very important. In line with this, culturally-important actions such as handshakes cannot be done through video conferencing. Further, there are concerns about security and privacy of video conferencing.

Think About This
What are other technologies that may impact business trips?
What role do you think COVID-19 will have on the impact of technology on business travel post-pandemic? How might COVID-19 impact this relationship in the long term?
If the number of business trips are significantly reduced by technological advancements, what will be the impact on the tourism industry (e.g., hotel sales)?
If the number of business trips are significantly reduced by technological advancements, what strategies should the hospitality and tourism service providers follow to stimulate business travel demand to combat this impact?

Anxiety and Worry in the Age of Permanxiety
Destination safety and security is a destination attribute that is extremely important to travelers. In todays global world, however, negative geopolitical events such as the series of terrorist attacks that took place in London and Paris have become all too frequent occurrences. The impact of these negative events, magnified by todays omnipresent Internet connectivity, has created great anxiety and worry among travelers. A Skift report coined the term Permanxiety to describe this emerging travel worry culture.

Although terrorist attacks and mass shootings would only drive away travelers temporarily, other factors that worry travelers could have a more permanent impact on whether they would travel or where they would travel to. Certain activities that travelers have to engage in, such as going through security and immigration at airports, could cause traveler anxiety.

Travelers can also be worried about traveling to a destination that is culturally foreign. They may have feelings of worry and anxiety about travel due to their personal conditions such as having a physical disability. Under-represented groups such as LGBT travelers could also fear traveling due to discrimination that they could possibly experience. Media reports from newspaper and social media are further heightening traveler worries. For instance, a story about travelers being discriminated against or not treated well by their Airbnb host might go viral on social media. Such news could add anxiety to travelers planning to use Airbnb services.

What can the hospitality and tourism industry do to mitigate travel anxieties? Some airports, for instance, provide therapy dogs to calm anxious passengers. High-end hotels encourage their customers to engage in wellness-related activities such as meditation retreats and yoga. Hotels can also train their employees how to serve their customers in a way that relieves traveler worries and stress. The key point is that the employees need to understand what could make their customers uneasy and develop a sense of empathy for their customers. Airbnb, for instance, is providing programs via online education and community meetings to train their hosts and make sure they understand their guests need for safety and security. There are mobile apps that travel companies have created to help alleviate traveler anxiety. One such example is an app called companion that connects travelers with their friends or family members. Essentially the latter becomes the virtual travel companion for a traveler. To help address the concern that traveling in an unfamiliar place could worry travelers, this app allows their friends or family members to be able to track their journey via GPS.

ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS:
Think About This
This is an individual activity. In total, your answers must be at least 150 words long.

What are other possible factors that could make travelers worry about traveling?
What may be things a destination can do to help visitors in need of assistance in unforeseen circumstances such as terrorist attacks? What would such a help system be like
What can other types of businesses in the hospitality and tourism industry (e.g., event sites and restaurants) do to alleviate travelers worries?
Conduct research online and find a strategy that either a destination or hospitality and tourism business has used in an effort to alleviate travelers worry. Provide a brief summary (in your own words), your key takeaways/lessons learned, and a citation for the original source.

Culturally-Oriented Hotel Amenity and Service Design
If you are to stay at a hotel, what kinds of services do you expect? While your expectations can vary by what types of hotel you are staying at (e.g., luxurious amenities would be expected for high-end hotels), cultural backgrounds of guests can also influence their preferences, and thus hotel practices. In fact, an increasing number of hotel companies are taking guests cultural background into consideration. Culturally tailored services and amenities can be found in many hotels in the United States.

One particular market that has received increasing attention from the hotel industry is the Chinese tourist market. According to a Skift report (2016), Chinese tourists are projected to be the largest overseas tourist market to the United States by 2020. Hotels are re-designing their offerings to cater to Chinese travelers preferences and habits.

For example, in response to this trend, the Sheraton Boston in the Back Bay neighborhood has updated its in-room amenities to include slippers, instant noodles, an electric kettle, and green tea items that are welcomed by Chinese guests. Addition of Chinese breakfast foods such as congee is becoming a common practice in many hotels, including the A.C. Hotel in Chicago Downtown. Caesars in Las Vegas took a more aggressive initiative in order to accommodate their guests. They now offer a room booking and payment system on WeChat, the most widely utilized Chinese social media mobile application.

ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS:
Think About This
This is an individual activity. In total, your answers must be at least 150 words long.

How does culture play an important role in shaping traveler needs and wants?
For hotels, why is it important for them to tailor their offerings based on guests cultural backgrounds?
What may be other areas that hotels can work on to better accommodate guests from different cultural backgrounds?
Is it possible for hospitality and tourism service providers to over-adapt and reduce the novelty value that many travelers may seek when they travel abroad?

In recent years, with the ready availability of online consumer reviews, consumers have increasingly resorted to online reviews for information and decision support. In fact, according to Forrester Research, more than 80 percent of online consumers consult others reviews when making purchasing decisions. Online consumer reviews have become a major assistive mechanism for consumer decision support. Travel purchases such as hotel booking and restaurant selection are such products where consumers increasingly resort to online reviews for information.

Meanwhile travelers are increasingly willing to share online their views of and experiences with tourism and hospitality services. With an increasingly large amount of consumer generated information available, one potential challenge is information overload and information trustworthiness on the part of the consumers as these e-WOMs are essentially generated by strangers, albeit fellow travelers. Consumers spend a large amount of time to filter out irrelevant information.

Research on how prospective hotel consumers consult with and process information provided by online reviews has shown that consumers tend to use simplified heuristics to arrive at judgments about the desirability of potential hotel choices. Researchers observe that when a review site provides a reviewers demographics (e.g., age and gender) alongside a hotel review, prospective hotel customers perceive the review more useful, more trustworthy, and have a higher tendency to select the hotel among similar alternatives.

ANSWER THE FOLLWING QUESTIONS:
1. How does traveler-generated information assist travel and hospitality consumers?

2. Why do you think providing reviewer demographic information may improve consumers likelihood to favor a hotel product?

3. What cues do prospective hotel consumers use to arrive at quality judgment?

4. What quantifiable information are provided by tripadvisor.com? Have they effectively simplified cues for traveler decision-making? Can they further improve their review platform design?