China ‘number one destination by 2024’
China will be the world’s number one tourist destination, Qatar will be popular for family holidays, and a week in Australia for £99 will become reality. These are some of the conclusions of the Future Holiday Forum, hosted this week by Thomson Holidays. According to a report produced by the holiday company following the forum, no-frills travel will expand into the long-haul market so that UK travellers will be able to take advantage of short breaks to cities such as Moscow, Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town with the development of the Cosmoplane – the successor to Concorde. It goes on to predict that countries such as Slovenia, Slovakia, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan are set for a huge boom in tourism over the next two decades, and that the number of UK travellers taking cruises will triple to more than three million a year by 2024. But perhaps the most surprising prediction is that the hotel of the future will be a “fully transportable super pod, containing rooms of various sizes, that can be dismantled and moved to any location in the world, be it the South Pacific, the Arctic or the desert”. Russell Amerasekera, of the BBC’s Perfect Holiday programme, chaired the forum. He said: “These predictions for the holiday of the future are very bold and may seem extreme in some cases, but they are all very viable possibilities for travel in 20 years’ time. “Taking a look back at the enormous changes the holiday industry has undergone in the past two decades, who would have predicted we would be holidaying in Vietnam or jetting to European cities for less than £20?” To see the full report visit www.lexispr.com/thomson
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