6 Travel Innovations We've Covered: Did They Live Up to the Promise?

Skift has covered throughout the years dozens of innovations poised to fundamentally alter travel — several of which we featured in a newsletter regularly published in 2017 and 2018 named the Skift Corporate Travel Innovation Report.

Although the report primarily focused on business travel's changing landscape as well as its future, it included trends and tech advances affecting the travel industry as whole — including airlines, hotels and online travel agencies.

So have those innovations truly been groundbreaking? We take a look at six of them we showcased in the report and examine through our coverage how they've impacted the travel industry.

Skift repeatedly addressed the impact of virtual reality would have in the travel industry in the Innovation Report, noting that the technology had finally gone mainstream in 2017. The use of virtual reality was already prevalent in the events industry. Meet L.A., part of the Los Angeles Tourism & Convention Board, had launched the Virtual Discovery L.A. in 2016, which enabled conference planners to explore event venues throughout the city in virtual reality.

However, virtual reality's expected boom had been slowed by factors such as costly headsets and lack of content. Even Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, found that many of its employees didn't have virtual reality headsets, making them reluctant to use its Horizon Workrooms app that allows users represented by avatars t