Salla Salokangas, Miltton
Trend research – the future examined together with the consumer
A journey described in detail, in which almost nothing is about the aircraft.
Salla Salokangas ran the only primary research in the project. Miltton interviewed frequent-flying young adults in Hong Kong, Milan and New York, and this essay reports what they said they wanted from air travel — assembled into a single narrated journey set in 2093.
Her framing claim is about method. “The big trends of the future already exist. They are small signals and tendencies that still remain unnoticed by most people. By analysing the signals we can predict which of them will strengthen into phenomena in a certain subculture, country, continent or worldwide.”
Then a harder assertion: trends are not weather. “Trends can also be consciously created, and weak signals can be strengthened and directed.” Coming from a communications agency, that is a claim about the agency’s own leverage as much as about consumer behaviour, and the essay does not distinguish between spotting a signal and manufacturing one.
The trip to Tokyo
The composite traveller is a business passenger flying to a conference. What she chooses is consistently about time, environment and privacy rather than about speed.
She arrives early on purpose. There is “still lots of time before my departure, but I’d rather spend a couple of hours in the airport’s relaxing stretching room than extend my working day at the office.” Her presentation is finished, so she has no work to do in the air, and she picks an interactive travel package of entertainment and services — explicitly excluding shopping, because she would rather buy in Tokyo.
The booking decision is made on environmental grounds. “Before I booked the flight I asked various airlines for calculations of the total ecological footprint of my journey. These helped me compare what the airlines were offering also from a sustainable development perspective.” She chooses the carrier flying modern aircraft on the most direct route.
Then the service detail the research seems to have been proudest of: a personal flight attendant is proposed to her in advance, matched on interests. Thomas is a fan of rock clubs, which makes him useful to a passenger travelling alone who might want an evening out in Tokyo.
Onboard she visits a relaxation lounge, does yoga, tells Thomas her food choice — an evening snack of eco food — has a drink in the aircraft bar, then retires to a private sleeping booth to browse Tokyo sights before sleeping. She is nervous about the conference. The flight is scheduled so she arrives rested and without jetlag.
What actually shipped
Three of those wishes became ordinary products well before 2093.
Per-journey emissions estimates at the point of booking arrived within about a decade, first as airline calculators and then embedded directly into flight search. Paid airport wellness facilities — lounges, spas, quiet rooms, gyms — became a standard revenue line. Private lie-flat sleeping suites on long-haul aircraft became the premium product the whole cabin is designed around.
Two did not. The attendant matched on personal taste never appeared, and the reasons are structural: crew rostering is built around duty limits and qualifications, not passenger affinity. Scheduling flights around a passenger’s rest rather than around slot availability also did not happen, for the same kind of reason. Slots at capacity-constrained airports are the scarce asset, and the timetable is built from them.
The pattern in what survived
The wishes that came true were the ones an airline could sell separately. The wishes that did not were the ones requiring it to reorganise operations around an individual.
That is a sharper finding than the essay itself draws. Salokangas describes air travel as “a multidimensional experience made up of numerous communications and interactions; meetings of people, products, form language and values”, with the passenger at the centre making choices from prior experience and impression. The industry agreed, and then monetised the parts of that experience it could unbundle — which is close to what Ingo Wuggetzer predicted in the business section, arriving from the opposite direction.
The stretching room, incidentally, exists. Several large hub airports opened yoga and stretching rooms in the 2010s, unpriced, which is the one item on the list that arrived without a fare attached.