Cabin layout aboard airplanes has always been about maximising space and one of the winning innovations at the Crystal Cabin Awards 2021 suggested replacing the middle aisle with a series of desks in a coffee shop-style setting, offering more space for passengers to work or study while aboard. The Coffee House Cabin concept from the University of Cincinnati sits four passengers at each table and all seats rotate towards the front during take-off and landing, while the table wings fold down for safety.
Another award-winning concept comes from Airbus, whose Airspace Cabin Vision 2030 offers passengers greater flexibility and a personalised flight experience. The AI-controlled cabin concept offers swivel seats for business travellers, private compartments for families and even bunk beds. Customers will be able to select a variety of options at the time of booking, from interactive windows and workstations to comfortable seats and even a sports area.
Together with seaplane airline Harbour Air, magniX completed the first successful test flight of an all-electric plane in December 2019, while Eviation's nine-passenger Alice aircraft has already secured orders from regional operators. New Zealand's Electric Air recently unveiled its take on the technology, Californian startup Wright Electric is partnering with Swiss airline easyJet on a zero-emission flying machine and Rolls-Royce has teamed up with Tecnam to produce an all-electric private jet.
According to Airbus, the passenger planes of 2050 will boast upper-level viewing decks with panoramic windows providing awesome 360-degree views that can transform into opaque screens in an instant. The European aerospace corporation also predicts the aircraft of the future will be kitted out with ergonomic memory foam massage seats serving drinks and vitamins, and collect body heat to power in-cabin features.
These automated seats will waft calming scents as well, from sea breezes to fresh pine. Sound showers, sleep hormones and special shades to block out light will coax passengers into blissful slumber and minimise jet lag, while cabins will feature state-of-the-art entertainment zones dedicated to relaxing and playing games.
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A blast from the past, passenger airships will offer luxe air cruises in the near future. Unlike the ill-fated Zeppelins of the early 20th century, these aircraft run on helium and jet fuel, and even solar power, rather than notoriously unstable hydrogen. The UK's Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV) is out in front with its Airlander 10 aircraft. Bobbing along at a gentle top speed of 91 miles per hour (145 km/h) at far lower altitudes than a plane, the airship features windows that can open, making it perfect for sightseeing.
Under a recent deal with Spanish airline Air Nostrum, HAV is building 10 of their Airlanders for commercial travel. Production is tipped to start in 2022 and the aircraft will be delivered in 2026. Initially, they'd serve on a Barcelona to Mallorca route, whisking passengers away in around four hours. Other players in the field include Lockheed Martin's SkyTug and LMH-1 hybrid airships as well as Aeroscraft.
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The brainchild of Elon Musk and his Boring Company, Hyperloop is a “fifth mode of transportation” that consists of sealed near-vacuum tubes through which levitating pods can travel at hypersonic speeds. Seemingly the stuff of science fiction, the technology, which could slash journey times significantly. Musk has made the technology open-source, enabling other companies to develop it, and Richard Branson's Virgin has stepped up to the challenge with aplomb.
In November 2020 the firm completed the first successful passenger journey at the Hyperloop test site in the Nevada desert. The company's CTO Josh Giegel and Director of Passenger Experience Sara Luchian travelled the length of the 1,640-foot (500m) test track in 15 seconds, at a speed of 107 miles per hour (172 km/h). In the future, the pods are projected to attain speeds around 620 miles per hour (1,000 km/h).
Whereas Hyperloop will connect cities by 2050, SkyTran could be the transport system of choice within them. With its two-person pods, the computer-controlled monorail will whizz above the traffic at 150 miles per hour (240 km/h). The track runs 20 or 30 feet (6m or 9m) in the air and can even be designed to go through buildings.
The coolest bit? Passengers will be able to summon a pod on-demand to nearby stations, making this like an extreme version of Uber. SkyTran, which is backed by a whole host of bigwig investors including former Google chairman Eric Schmidt and India's Reliance Industries, is hoping to build tracks in the United Arab Emirates, Israel, France, India, Germany, Indonesia, Malaysia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Numerous firms including German startup Lilium and China's Ehang have already completed successful test flights. Dubai is vying to offer the world's first air taxi service, which is expected to launch in 2026, with similar plans in Spanish cities such as Barcelona and Valencia. While Orlando is set to be America's first flying taxi airport, with services to launch by 2025.
Meanwhile, passengers flying into Italy's capital will be able to skip the traffic and arrive into Rome city centre from the air, as early as 2024. German startup company Volocopter hopes to partner up with Fiumicino Airport to enable a rotor-bladed, battery-powered two-seater air taxi to take off. The innovative company also plans to launch the same service at the Paris Olympics in 2024.
Along with having flying taxis and buses at their disposal, tourists in 2050 will also likely be able to hire out airborne motorbikes to convey them from place to place. This may seem far-fetched but the technology is already out there. French aviation company Lazareth has developed a flying motorcycle called the LMV 496, which has a range of around 60 miles (100km). The futuristic motorbike uses four horizontal jet engines, one for each wing.
Lazareth's main competitor, Russian firm Hoversurf's flying electric motorbike is called the Scorpion 3. The vehicle is already in production and has been embraced by the Dubai Police Force, which has signed a deal to test and demonstrate the contraptions, though the trials haven't been without their setbacks as a video of one crashing, which went viral, has shown.
If flying taxis, buses and motorbikes don't take the fancy of the 2050 tourist, then a jet pack no doubt will. That most elusive of futuristic transportation technologies will probably be ubiquitous by 2050, delighting science fiction and action movie fans the world over. Plenty of proposals have however fallen by the wayside in recent years, including Martin Aircraft's headline-grabbing version, while French jet pack pilot Vince Reffet was killed in a training accident in Dubai earlier in November 2020.
Clearly, companies in the field will have to overcome a plethora of technological and safety issues before the jet pack goes mainstream, but the future does actually look pretty bright with several firms such as America's JetPack Aviation and the UK's Gravity Industries making great strides.
And speaking of jet packs, the clever people at the Great North Air Ambulance in northwest England have come up with a quirky – and quick – way of rescuing any ramblers in trouble on the Lake District fells. The helicopter emergency service has teamed up with renewable energy leader Ørsted and Gravity Industries to trial the viability of jet suit paramedics. Currently, the organisation plans to develop paramedic's flight skills to a level where they can participate in real life assistance. Find out more about this potential lifesaving invention here.
Physical passports, which were first issued in 1920, will likely be a distant memory in 2050 and the sole preserve of collectors of antique ephemera. They have long been supplanted by virtual cloud-based technology whereby travellers are identified using biometrics such as retina and fingerprint scans alone. Their days are already numbered in fact.
The Australian and New Zealand governments are working on a cloud-based system that will permit their citizens to travel between the two countries without a physical passport, and other nations are likely to follow suit. This means travellers need never worry about forgetting to pack their travel document or renewing it, or stress about it being lost or stolen while on their travels.
Just about everything that can be automated in the future will, and that includes flight attendants, airport and hotel staff, and tour guides. A multilingual inflight service bot called Pepper has already been developed and even as soon as 2030, robots will have taken over our airports according to a study by Aira and Vero Solutions. The rise of the airport automatons has actually begun in earnest.
Kansai Airport in Japan has an intelligent check-in robot called KATE, Geneva Airport has launched Leo, a bag drop bot, LG automatons clean South Korea's Incheon Airport and assist passengers, while New York's La Guardia has a security robot that patrols Terminal B. Futurologist James Canton foresees automated hotel butlers and concierges, and researchers are currently experimenting with robot tour guides.
Like the physical passport, the travel phrase book and even standard translation apps will be rendered obsolete as real-time interpreting technology becomes ever more sophisticated. Instead, travellers of the future will speak into devices or wear gadgets in their ears that translate words in an instant, much like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy's Babel fish.
Sub-orbital flights, during which paying passengers can experience weightlessness and marvel at the Earth's curvature and the mind-blowing expanse of space for several minutes, have been in the pipeline for years now. Although scheduled flights haven't happened yet, they most certainly should be widely available by 2050 when they are likely to be relatively affordable and mainstream, but will cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars in the early days.
Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin are the two main contenders in the sub-orbital tourism race. Virgin Galactic completed a test flight from Spaceport America in New Mexico during May 2021 uses a spacecraft deployed at altitude from a carrier plane, while Blue Origin is taking a more traditional approach with its rocket that ascends straight up from the ground. Tickets with Virgin Galactic cost £335,000 ($450k) with the first commercial flights currently expected to start at the beginning of 2023.
Elon Musk's SpaceX is the key player in the orbital tourism race. Unlike sub-orbital trips, which are all-too brief, flights into the Earth's orbit will last for days. The first SpaceX tourists will have to be rolling in it to stretch to a ticket, which is expected to cost in the tens of millions. Though prices will have likely fallen considerably by 2050, this trip will still be out of reach for many.
SpaceX is also planning to fly passengers around the Moon, and expects to launch the debut mission as soon as 2023 with the first passenger, Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, already confirmed. Maezawa is offering free tickets for eight lucky applicants for the first trip. After that, tickets will cost an absolute fortune, but are likely to become more affordable by 2050 when stays on the Earth's satellite will probably be on offer too, though those on an average wage will be unlikely to have the funds to snap up a trip.
While many experts are sceptical, Elon Musk is adamant that humans will have colonised Mars by 2050 and recently announced that SpaceX is planning to launch its first crewed mission to the Red Planet within this decade. If all goes to plan, Musk anticipates that a self-sustaining domed city will be built on the planet within 30 years.
Gone are the days when there was a stigma attached to holidaying solo, and a growing proportion of the travel industry is already gearing up for the explosion in solitary travellers by waiving or getting rid entirely of single supplement surcharges, not to mention pivoting their packages towards those who prefer to go it alone.
Voyeuristic tourists will flock to locations plagued by wars and poverty. These sorts of holidays already exist, from extreme tours of conflict-hit countries to day trips to deprived urban areas. And as climate change alters environments and sparks an ever-increasing number of extinctions, intrepid travellers will want to visit endangered habitats to experience them and any threatened species before they vanish for good.
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A study by the European Union's Joint Research Centre depressingly predicts that a third of the world's beaches could disappear by 2050 due to climate change, which is leading to a rise in sea levels, rampant coastal erosion and fiercer storms. Beach holidays are therefore likely to become less common and more expensive.
Conversely, summer mountain holidays will probably surge in popularity. In a recent report, the World Tourism Organization describes this as one of the upsides of climate change. Mountain summers will be warmer and last longer, and high-altitude resorts will be able to recreate a beach-like atmosphere with palm trees planted along mountain lakes.
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They include the Underwater Suite at Dubai's Atlantis, The Palm, the Jules' Undersea Lodge in Key Largo, Florida, Mexico's Lovers Deep submarine hotel, and a whole lot more besides, including The Manta Resort in Zanzibar, Sweden's Utter Inn and a couple of underwater restaurants in the Maldives.
One thing’s for sure – by 2050, advances in transport and building will mean travel will have become more sustainable. Eco-friendly pop-up hotels are likely to be a crucial part of this push towards lower-impact tourism, a shining example of which is Living the Till, a portable treetop hotel imagined by Florida architecture firm EoA.
Thanks to advances in neuroscience, guests will sleep in beds that will enable them to choose their dreams with hotels offering special dream menus, plus these beds will likely monitor their health and even help them learn a new skill while they slumber. Rooms might well be kitted out with 3D makers too that guests can use to print pretty much anything they desire, negating the need for luggage.
In 2050, many people may decide to eschew physical travel entirely and opt for a virtual holiday Black Mirror-style. By this time, computing power should be powerful enough to create hyper-realistic virtual worlds that uncannily mimic the real thing. Already, virtual tourists can 'visit' tourist hot spots around the world, from the Eiffel Tower and Taj Mahal to Manhattan and the Rocky Mountains.
To make the VR holiday as realistic as possible, the whole shebang will have to be multi-sensory with the user experiencing the sounds, smells and feelings of the location, as well as the sights. Feelreal, the world's first multi-sensory mask, which replicates smells, hot and cold winds, water mist and vibrations, is already available to order, while researchers at the University of Chicago have created a VR system that uses chemicals that trigger nerves in the nose to deliver temperature sensations, whether that's the heat of the tropics or the chill of the polar regions.
VR holidays may even have the edge over the real deal given they will be able to simulate time travel experiences. Think a city tour of ancient Rome, a luxe stay in Versailles pre-French Revolution or even an Arctic or Amazon expedition before climate change and pollution had ravaged the pristine environment.
These simulated time travel experiences will likely be the last word in cultural and educational holidays, along with school and university trips as they will allow the traveller to be fully immersed in the sights, sounds, smells and feelings of the period they choose to virtually explore. This will certainly beat reading a book, hitting a history site or watching a documentary hands-down.
Supersonic passenger flights ended in 2003 as Concorde was retired by both Air France and British Airways, but now there is promise of supersonic travel returning. US airline United has announced plans to buy 15 new supersonic planes and have them carry passengers by 2029. The new aircraft, called Overture, will be produced by a Denver-based company Boom and promises to take customers from London to New York in three-and-a-half hours.
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Boom is also confident it can resolve the two major issues of supersonic travel – noise and pollution – while cutting travel times on transatlantic routes historically flown by Concorde. The Overture isn't supposed to be louder than a standard modern-day passenger jet and tweaks in design mean the sonic boom will be reduced and mitigated. The company also expects to operate Overture as a "net-zero carbon aircraft" by using sustainable aviation fuel. The company is palnning to flight-test their supersonic jet in 2026.
Elsewhere, Boston's Spike Aerospace is working on an ultra-quiet supersonic business jet that will reduce flight times by half. More ambitiously, Atlanta-based startup Hermeus has secured funding to develop a Mach 5 passenger plane that will make the journey from New York to Paris in just 90 minutes, and the UK and Australian space agencies are collaborating on a hypersonic plane project incorporating Reaction's SABRE engine that would cut the flight time from London to Sydney to a mere four hours.
Not only does it look seriously cool, Otto Aviation’s new Celera 500L is designed with efficiency in mind: its bullet-like shape is extremely aerodynamic, which reduces the amount of fuel needed to power it. In fact, according to CEO William Otto Jr., it’s seven to eight times more efficient than jet aircraft. It will be able to hold six passengers and can travel at speeds of up to 460 miles per hour (740km/h).
The Celera 500L has a single diesel engine at the back, though Otto hopes to replace this with an electric or hydrogen one in the near future, which would make the aircraft emission-free. The prototype has been flown for around 55 test flights, while the plane itself is expected to go on sale in 2025 and aimed at private owners.
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This futuristic concept hybrid between a plane and a hotel is designed to never land as 20 nuclear-powered engines are supposed to keep this luxury hotel in the air. On board the Sky Cruise, over 5,000 guests will be able to spend their time in the gym, swimming pool, restaurants, theatre and even a giant shopping mall. Passengers will board and leave the hotel while still airborne and the plane supposedly will fly autonomously. With its 360-degree panorama of the surrounding skies, the flying hotel even presents itself as a perfect wedding venue.
Although Sky Cruise sounds and looks incredible, the flying hotel is far from becoming reality. Unfortunately, with our current technology, this gigantic hotel would have trouble taking off and is a long way from being aerodynamic. Another issue is the cost – with all the new technology needed and the added luxury, a stay on the Sky Cruise would be extremely inaccessible to most. However, who knows what might be possible in a few decades…