By Emmanuel Mounier, Secretary General, Global Travel Tech.
Introduction
On the screen of a consumer planning her holiday, travel seems perfectly seamless. She uses online booking platforms offering well-timed transfers, user-friendly design, and a well-thought-out itinerary. Off-screen, however, reality tends to offer a less seamless experience. One where a delayed ground transport connection means the traveller will miss a flight and suddenly be stuck overnight at an airport. A reality where ground and air transport do not communicate with each other, delays disrupt travel plans, and consumers are left fending for themselves without any real oversight.
Of course, travel agencies offer package travel that takes responsibility for transfers and provides insurance. But an increasing number of travellers, especially younger generations, are booking their trips by combining the best options across different modes of transport.
Where the cracks start to appear
The cracks in the illusion of seamlessness in multi-modal transport start to appear quite quickly when taking a closer look. There is often no real-time alert system between airports and ground transport operators to share data about delays and cancellations. Additionally, ground transport still sits outside many airport operational systems, to the detriment of both consumer experience and efficiency.
Fragmented booking systems across ground and air transport also mean travellers may have to wait for connections at bus stops, central stations, or airports for hours, sometimes overnight to be able to continue their multi-modal journey towards their final destination. This is especially common with cheaper options that often involve late-night or early-morning departures, often utilizing airports further from big cities and less connected with ground transport making the impact of delays or unexpected cancellations even worse.
So why hasn’t the market already fixed it?
A general mismatch of schedules and mixed business incentives makes it difficult to achieve the “seamless” experience in reality. Airlines are, of course, focused on optimising flight operations and their own organisational infrastructure. Ground transport operators are focused on maximising their own networks and capacity, and airports are similarly focused on managing their terminals, not end-to-end passenger journeys.
To truly achieve a seamless multi-modal experience, airports, airlines, ground transport operators, infrastructure managers, and regulators all need to come together. Each of them is used to operating in its own distinct sphere, which makes mutual understanding and coordination a real challenge.
What can Regulators do?
Regulators cannot force seamless travel into existence on their own. But they can make it much easier for the industry to build it. Their role should not be to design every connection from bus station to boarding gate, but to create the conditions for better coordination. That means encouraging common standards, making data-sharing easier across modes, and ensuring that infrastructure projects are planned with end-to-end passenger journeys in mind rather than in modal silos.
What is still missing today is not just innovation, but alignment. If airports, airlines, and ground transport operators all work with different systems, different incentives, and different definitions of responsibility, then “seamless travel” will remain more of a slogan than a reality. Regulators can help close that gap, not by overengineering the market, but by giving it a framework in which interoperability becomes easier and more worthwhile.
Why this matters now
Today’s consumers expect more from the travel industry. They expect travel to be more climate-conscious, more consumer-friendly, and better able to connect different modes of transport into one seamless end-to-end journey. The future of consumer-focused travel cannot be consumers taking a 4 am flight, 500 kilometres in the wrong direction, just to catch a connection that takes them back towards their actual destination.
The future of travel has to become more flexible and more customisable, for both climate and consumer. Combining public transport, shuttle buses, sleeper trains, and other forms of ground transport with air travel is clearly part of that future. Smart booking platforms that integrate AI into the booking process, offer real-time notifications, and allow more tailored itineraries are also part of it.
The 21st century should be the time to make multi-modal travel truly seamless. Otherwise, the industry risks being seen as a relic that still struggles to modernise.