Next wave in digitization

Mobile devices and digitization have brought many changes but most of them were concerned about remodeling enterprise processes to the advantage of companies however these are defined. On the one hand this has made many actions by consumers more direct and has eliminated in many cases a long chain of intermediaries, but on the other hand, has burdened the user of these digital devices with additional activities and in some cases with additional work he wasn’t realizing before these changes occurred. This is especially obvious within the tourism industry. Before the advent of all these accommodation and transportation platforms like ebookers.com, booking.com, kayak.com, uber.com, airbnb.com and many others, a consumer would usually go to a tourism agency and have them book everything concerning the travel. Nowadays most newer generations do everything on one or more of the before mentioned platforms. The difference is that all the work that used to be realized by the travel agency is now done by the digital tourist. This DIY workload is partly reflected in a new pricing structure for traveling.

But it seems that there is a new wave of automatism that is providing less work for the traveler. In Switzerland, for instance, an app called lezzgo.ch provides a new way of using all types of public transportation across the whole country. The functionality is very easy and intuitive: before each trip, the user toggles a switch to check in and as soon as the trip has ended the switch is toggled in the opposite direction to check out. The system automatically calculates the cheapest possible price and charges through a formerly registered payment method.

This process of eliminating workload from the user could become a common evolution of the digital world especially in those areas in which the user has been burdened with additional work due to the elimination of intermediaries.