How Autonomous Vehicles Will Reshape Hospitality
Addressing the under-appreciated implications of broad Level 4 autonomy
It was December 2014, and my wife Amanda and I were spending a few weeks traveling through Vietnam. We had booked a few days in Sa Pa, a picturesque mountain town near the Chinese border, where we had reservations to stay at the Victoria, a high-end resort in the region.
Sa Pa is an extraordinary place, and the Victoria is an excellent hotel. The problem, of course, is accessibility. Sa Pa is an unpredictable, nauseating, five-hour-at-best drive from Hanoi on questionable Vietnamese surface roads. There are no major airports nearby. Most Vietnamese would make the trip either by motorbike or overnight government train, and nothing says “luxury resort experience” like taking an overnight government train.
The owners of the Victoria, like true luxury hoteliers, came up with a very creative solution to this problem. Instead of leaving it to guests to find their own way to the resort, the hotel took ownership of the problem by taking over several cars on the aforementioned overnight train, transforming the overnight train ride into a hospitality experience unlike much else.
For guests, the Victoria experience starts at the Hanoi train station in the late evening, where they’re greeted by hotel staff offering hot towels and glasses of champagne. Guests are then brought to a dining room on the train, where dinner is served, before being shown to private cabins to sleep away the seven-hour train ride.
The Victoria solved its accessibility problem by extending the hospitality experience far closer to the guest’s origin: the Hanoi train station 300 kilometers away. By doing so, it was able to unlock an extraordinary destination that—otherwise—most luxury-seeking travelers would avoid.
Of course, most Thesis Driven readers are not building hotels in rural Vietnam. But I share this anecdote because it offers some lessons about where real estate—and hospitality specifically—might be headed as autonomous vehicles become very real, very quickly. Today, we’ll tackle autonomous vehicles’ accelerating progress, the implications for the hospitality sector, and changing notions of how we think about hospitality as conceptually.
The Rise of the Autonomous Car
We called the arrival of autonomous vehicles in a Thesis Driven letter a year ago. If anything, we underestimated the speed at which AVs would progress; Waymo’s publication of some very positive safety stats earlier this year turned heads and convinced a many that the AV wave is coming sooner than anyone thought.