TUI AG, or TUI, is a German travel and tourism company that's considered the largest leisure, travel, and tourism company in the world. They own cruise ships, airlines, retail stores, hotels, and travel agencies.

The company has been working to incorporate both VR and augmented reality into their travel services.

One of their projects involves creating a seamless app that uses augmented reality to improve the travel experience. This includes allowing travelers to more easily find their bus, or learn more about the area by wearing a pair of glasses that display the information.

Gone are the days that you would need to find your vacation coordinator or scramble to find out which bus might be yours, once you arrive at the airport, that's bringing you to your hotel, because now you can follow the directed path through the app and it will show you exactly where you need to go.

Ultimately, they're hoping that these advances will improve the travel experience and help book more excursion tickets.

They've already been using VR for some time, allowing people to learn about places to visit. They can use the VR to create tours of holiday excursions, to give people an idea of what they will see if they book the trip. In hotels where they've already been trialed, they've had great success.

You might think that once someone sees through the VR that potential vacation spot, from the comfort of their home or right where they are at the time, that they might be satisfied and not feel the need to go there in person. But they've found the exact opposite with testing out this experience with travelers. Once they see the potential excursion or vacation spot etc, they are even more enthusiastic then to sign up and go there to visit.

In high season, TUI will see thousands of passengers every single day.

Aside from VR and augmented reality, they've also been looking at facial recognition and admit that they are preparing for a possible hands-free, wearables travel future.

They expect that in some years to come, that the phone will no longer be the primary travel device. For now, mobile devices are still regarded as an essential travel item.

That "Holiday Feeling"

That holiday feeling is a little different for everyone. Your ideal spot might be somewhere in the woods, surrounded by nothing but the sound of a crackling fire nearby. For others it might be the crashing of the waves on a beach, with the feeling of sand between your toes.

According to previous research on the subject, conducted by TUI UK with help from the University College London's Affective Brain Lab, it's estimated that it takes an average of 43 hours for travelers to reach that peak holiday feeling once they leave for vacation. After returning home and unpacking, they lose those feelings of euphoria in roughly 4 days.

While investigating this topic, researchers discovered 30 key triggers that are believed to prompt those holiday feelings, they include:

• hearing the ocean
• having an ice cream
• looking at the weather report and seeing nothing but 100% sunny skies ahead
• trying new foods
• packing your own suitcase
• swimming in the clear blue ocean
• stepping off the plane and feeling that initial heat wave once you've landed
• booking your holiday
• walking through and seeing your hotel for the first time
• watching the sunset
• checking in at your hotel
• smelling sun screen
• taking your first sip of a holiday cocktail
• smelling the salty sea air

Knowing that the "holiday feeling" peaks after about 43 hours, perhaps spending much more time than that on vacation isn't worth it, if it isn't going to bring the same satisfaction.

Researchers discovered that more than 90 percent of travelers wish that holiday feeling would last longer.

Previous research from the University of Colorado at Boulder, has found that travel experiences are likely to make people happier than material goods.

They discovered that people received more pleasure and overall satisfaction from investing in life experiences, rather than possessions.

And they aren't the only ones. In a separate 20 year study conducted by researchers at Cornell University, they also saw that spending money on experiences was likely to produce more happiness, as the happiness that's associated with 'things' quickly fades.

“One of the enemies of happiness is adaptation.. We buy things to make us happy, and we succeed. But only for a while. New things are exciting to us at first, but then we adapt to them.” - Dr. T. Gilovich

It's been said that millennials ignited the experience economy, but it has now grown to encompass almost everyone. It's believed that consumers in general today want experiences more than they want things.

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