By 2040, Travel Won't Be a Trip — It Will Be a Stack

My thesis is simple and, I think, uncomfortable: by 2040, "travel" will no longer describe a discrete journey from point A to point B. It will describe a layered stack of services — algorithmic planning, electrified short-haul flight, vertical urban mobility, sub-orbital experience tourism, and ambient digital presence — that consumers assemble the way they assemble a streaming bundle today. The word "trip" will feel as quaint by 2040 as "long-distance call" feels now. We are not heading toward a faster version of 2019 travel. We are heading toward a fundamentally different product category, and the industry that wins will be the one that stops thinking of itself as moving bodies through space and starts thinking of itself as orchestrating layered experiences.

The Stakes: An $11 Trillion Industry Is About to Be Re-Platformed

Travel and tourism contributed roughly $11 trillion to global GDP in 2024, which makes it not just an industry but one of the largest economic systems humans have ever built — bigger than most national economies, more globally distributed than any tech platform, more politically entangled than energy. When something this large gets re-platformed, the question isn't whether incumbents adapt; it's which incumbents survive the transition and which become cautionary chapters in business school case studies.

And the volume pressure is real. The UNWTO forecasts 1.8 billion international tourist arrivals by 2030 — a number we will, on current trajectory, be living with for the entire run-up to 2040. Each of those projected arrivals corresponds to roughly $6,111 of travel and tourism's 2024 global GDP impact, which is a useful way to grasp the per-traveler economic weight the system is being asked to carry. That weight cannot be carried by 2019-era infrastructure, 2019-era aircraft, or 2019-era booking flows. Something has to give, and what gives — I'm going to argue — is the very definition of what travel is.

So here is why this matters now: every capital allocation decision being made in 2025 across airlines, hotels, OTAs, airport authorities, sovereign tourism boards, and the venture ecosystem is being made against an implicit model of what travel will look like in fifteen years. If that model is wrong — if travel really is becoming a stack rather than a trip — then trillions of dollars are being deployed against the wrong picture.

The Planning Layer: AI Doesn't Assist Travel, It Replaces the Travel Agent's Soul

Start at the top of the stack: how trips get assembled. Already, 30% of travelers say they're likely to use AI to plan holiday travel — and that's a 2024 number, captured before the current generation of agentic systems matured into anything resembling their final form. By 2040, the question won't be whether AI plans your trip. It will be whether you even perceive yourself as having "planned" anything at all.

This is bigger than a UX story. The travel industry has spent thirty years building a distribution architecture — global distribution systems, OTA aggregators, metasearch, loyalty programs, dynamic pricing engines — that assumes a human consumer browsing options and making discrete choices. That architecture monetizes friction. Search costs, comparison anxiety, fear-of-missing-out: these are the emotional substrates that hotel rate parity clauses and airline ancillary fees feed on. An AI agent that books on your behalf — with no emotional substrate, no FOMO, no brand loyalty beyond what you've explicitly programmed — vaporizes that monetization model.

I think this is the single most under-priced disruption in travel right now. Hotels and airlines obsess over sustainability narratives and loyalty redesigns while the foundational assumption of their distribution stack — that there is a human at the other end who can be nudged — is being quietly demolished. By 2040, the marketing department of a major hotel chain will be optimizing not for travelers but for the dozen or so AI agents that book on travelers' behalf. The vocabulary will shift from "guest experience" to "API readability."

The Mobility Layer: Electrification Is Not a Footnote, It's a Re-Geography

Below the planning layer sits the actual movement of bodies, and this is where the most physically visible changes will happen. The commercial electric aircraft market is projected to reach $1.46 billion by 2035, with the 200-500 km range segment registering the highest CAGR.

Now, $1.46 billion is roughly 0.013% of travel and tourism's 2024 GDP impact — a rounding error in industry terms. The skeptic's read is: "see, electric aviation is a niche, ignore it." The skeptic's read is wrong. What matters is not the size of the electric aircraft market but the geography it unlocks. The 200-500 km range bracket is precisely the distance where rail competes with regional jets, where regional jets currently lose money, and where the carbon math of short-haul flying is most embarrassing. Electrify that segment and you don't just decarbonize a sliver of aviation — you make economically viable a thousand city pairs that today have no reasonable air service.

Think about what that means for travel as a category. A small Mediterranean island that today requires a ferry plus a connection becomes a direct hop from three regional capitals. A second-tier ski resort that today loses bookings to its better-connected rival suddenly has parity. The geographic distribution of where travelers actually go — currently a brutally winner-take-all map dominated by maybe forty mega-destinations — gets flatter, more capillary, more granular. Travel by 2040 will not just be faster or greener at the edges; the actual map of where people go will look different.

The Vertical Layer: eVTOLs Don't Compete With Cars, They Compete With Airports

Then there is the layer that almost no one in the legacy travel industry takes seriously, and almost everyone in venture capital takes too seriously: vertical takeoff and landing electric aircraft. Over 1,000 eVTOL concepts have emerged worldwide, ranging from personal-use vehicles to urban air taxi services.

A thousand concepts will not become a thousand operators. Most will fail. Some will fail spectacularly. But the relevant question is not how many eVTOL companies exist in 2040 — the relevant question is what eVTOLs do to the economics of airport-adjacent geography. Consider that Singapore's Changi Airport sits 24 kilometres east of the Central Area. That distance — multiplied across every major airport in the world — represents a tax on every international journey: a taxi or train ride, an hour of friction, a queue, a parking fee, a stress headache. It is one of the most universal frictions in modern travel and almost no one talks about it as such.

An eVTOL network that can reliably move passengers from city center to airport in eight minutes doesn't replace cars. It replaces the cognitive and temporal cost of "going to the airport," which is one of the largest invisible deterrents to short trips. Make airport access trivial and the entire weekend-getaway category — currently dominated by drive-distance destinations — gets re-shuffled in favor of fly-distance destinations. By 2040, I suspect the line between "city" and "airport" will be far blurrier than it is today, and the winners will be the airport authorities that figure this out first. The losers will be the surface-transit operators who currently treat airport links as a captive monopoly.

The Experience Layer: Sub-Orbital Tourism Goes From Stunt to Segment

I'll grant the most easily mocked element of my argument right up front: space tourism. The Virgin Galactic story has been mostly comedic — flights delayed, share prices imploded, the parent company's ownership rationalized down to a 11.9% Virgin Group stake via Virgin Investments Limited, suggesting a strategic posture of "preserve optionality, minimize exposure" rather than "bet the farm."

And yet. The history of luxury travel is the history of stunts becoming segments. Trans-Atlantic ocean liners were stunts before they were industries. Commercial air travel was a stunt before it was an industry. Cruise tourism was a stunt — literally a marketing pivot of underutilized ships — before it became a $250 billion sub-economy. The pattern is the same: a small number of wealthy early adopters subsidize a learning curve, costs come down through engineering iteration, the experience standardizes, and within a generation what was unthinkable becomes a category on a comparison-shopping site.

By 2040, I expect sub-orbital flight to be available to perhaps a few tens of thousands of customers per year — small in absolute terms, but enough to constitute a recognizable luxury travel segment alongside private aviation, expedition cruising, and ultra-luxury safari. The reduced Virgin Group stake doesn't disprove this. It just confirms that the financial structure of moonshot tourism will look more like venture biotech than like legacy aviation: many failures, a few breakthroughs, eventual normalization.

The Stack as Product

Here is where it all converges into my central claim. Today, when someone says "I'm going to Lisbon for a week," they describe a trip — a discrete unit, planned discretely, booked discretely, experienced discretely. By 2040, the same intent will produce something more like a configuration: an AI agent assembles the planning layer; an electrified regional aircraft handles the inter-city movement; an eVTOL handles the city-to-airport friction; on the ground, a layered set of contextual services (the descendants of today's apps) provide ambient navigation, translation, and personalization; and for a small but visible cohort, the trip might include a sub-orbital flight as its anchor experience.

None of these layers, individually, redefines travel. The redefinition comes from their integration. The traveler of 2040 will not consciously choose each layer the way today's traveler chooses an airline and a hotel. They will choose a stack — pre-configured by an agent, branded perhaps by a single super-aggregator, paid for as a subscription or a bundle — and the stack will deliver the experience.

The companies that win this transition will be the ones that abandon the "trip" framing fastest. The companies that lose will be the ones that keep optimizing the individual layer they currently dominate, not realizing that the unit of competition has moved up a level of abstraction. We have seen this movie before in music (album → playlist → algorithmic feed), in television (channel → streaming service → content bundle), in transportation (car ownership → ride-share → mobility-as-a-service). Travel is next.

What This Means for Anyone Building in Travel Right Now

If you are running a hotel group, an airline, an OTA, a tourism board, or a travel-tech startup in 2025, the implication of this argument is not "invest in AI" or "invest in electric aircraft" or "hedge into eVTOLs." Those are tactical responses. The strategic response is harder: assume that by 2040 your customer no longer makes the choices you currently optimize for, because an agent makes them on the customer's behalf, and that agent does not care about your loyalty program, your brand voice, or your sustainability report. It cares about the parameters its principal gave it.

Build for that customer. Build APIs before you build campaigns. Build interoperability before you build moats. Build experiences that matter on the ground — because the ground experience is the one part of the stack that AI agents cannot abstract away — and let everything else become commoditized infrastructure.

The travel industry of 2040 will be enormous, more democratized, more geographically distributed, more electrified, and more algorithmically mediated than the one we have today. It will also be unrecognizable to the executives running today's incumbents, unless they start the work of un-recognizing it themselves, now. Fifteen years sounds like a long time. It is not. The capital allocation decisions being signed off this quarter will determine which companies are still in the photograph when the new definition of travel is finally written down. Pick the stack, not the trip. The trip is over.