7 Travel Trends To Watch Out For in 2015

A healthy respect for the wild abandon of random completely unforeseeable events has compelled me to put my crystal ball in the attic where it cultivates a fine coating of dust. Therefore the following list of trends are really just the tracking of already- moving vectors that have a good chance of moving more conspicuously in 2015.

ASEAN Economic Community Implementation

The coming of the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Economic Community (AEC) will be, to my thinking, the most significant story of the year. Much as the European Union brought a group of competitive, sometimes warring, nations to see themselves as important partners in a much larger world, so has ASEAN made the 600 million people of Southeast Asia see their common interests.

The combined GDP of Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam is roughly, give or take $10 billion, $2.1 trillion. The region's growing middle class represents a new and very rich vein of travel consumers.

The AEC comes with the ASEAN Single Air Market (ASAM) and both are scheduled for implementation in 2015. If it can overcome some very formidable obstacles, ASAM will have a significant impact.

When it takes effect, ASAM is will supersede existing bilateral and multi-lateral agreements between ASEAN member states that are not consistent with its dictates and create a single air space. Before too long, the word ASEAN may have a power commensurate to such other regional travel brands as Caribbean, Alpine or Mediterranean.

Food Expo and Farm to Table

We may well end up remembering the Milan Expo 2015 as a milestone on the way to a new understanding of food in travel. The Expo, running from May through October, will see more participating countries (144) than any World's Fair ever.

This will not be a mere gourmet fest. The pavilions will explore such subjects as nutrition, feeding the planet, energy for life, distribution, environment, and, of course, slow food. Organizers are promising an experience that will approximate a global journey of food and its lifestyle traditions.

For Italy, it's a chance to frame the cyclical and organic food traditions embodied in the slow food movement. As a guardian of those traditions, Italy is the ideal destination messenger. The emerging trend of farm to table travel has enormous potential and Italy, which gave us the slow food movement, will increasingly promote food as an expression of the specific soil, climate, craft and culture that produced it.

Slow fooders value food much in the same way that connoisseurs appreciate wine. Organizers hope to attract 20 million visitors from around the world to the Expo. I hope I'm one of them.

The Decline of Golf

Golf is losing its appeal to many Americans and no one has identified exactly why. Between 1985 and 2005, the U.S. added between 250 and 300 courses per year, often as the anchor attraction of a series of upscale housing developments in exurbia. The peak year was 2005, and since then the sport's been declining with fewer viewers for televised golf, sinking retail sales of equipment and the closure of some 500 courses across the U.S., mostly in places where they were components in housing projects.

The Orlando Sentinel reported on these abandoned courses going feral. The article cites research from the National Golf Foundation, saying that the number of American golfers in 2005 reached 30 million, a number that had fallen to 25.3 million by 2012. Some 15,516 golf facilities were in existence around the U.S. as of Jan. 1. (2013) including single courses and multi-course complexes. In 2013, some 13 new courses opened, while 157 closed nationwide.

Some blame the recession of 2008, others the normal trajectory of fads and some blame the lost mojo of Tiger Woods' star power.

Some BRICs are Falling

In 2013, we heard a lot about a reshuffling of market power toward the BRIC nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China. Well it's been a bad year for piggies whose house is built of oil, as the big bad wolf blew away about two thirds of its value. Countries tied heavily to oil, like Brazil and Russia, dropped the B and the R out of the BRIC. For Brazil it all seemed to begin with the humiliation on the soccer pitch at a World Cup that they'll remember as Napoleon remembered Waterloo. A series of white elephant arenas will not let them forget.

As for Russia, The Economist put it succinctly in a personal headline to Vladimir Putin, "As Ye Sow, So Shall Ye Reap" as the Ruble lost 40 percent of its value in three weeks' time with the collapse of oil values. The last we saw of Putin he was storming out of the G20 Meeting in Brisbane in full pout over the sanctions that the war in the Ukraine had brought down on him.

The missing tourists from these countries will leave a hole in all of those destinations that had begun marketing to them. For a brief time Russians showed that with prosperity they were voracious travelers. Some of the marketing budget that was used to attract those tourists will likely be redirected at the U.S. and other stable economies.

Some BRICs are Rising

A recent report from the World Travel Monitor found that from 2009 to 2013 outbound trips from Asia increased by 53 percent, double the rate of the average global market's outbound growth (22 percent). China easily came out number one, while India trailed Japan and South Korea.

India is a comer, so that fourth place finish as an Asian outbound market is just the thin end of the wedge. India is home to the world's largest middle class at 350 million. India and China, the I and the C in BRIC are coming on very strong.

Attract China is predicting that in 2015, 140 million Chinese tourists will go abroad, spending more than $188 billion, with the United States expected to receive as many as 2.85 million Chinese visitors, where they will spend more than $15 billion dollars.

Capsule and Pod Hotels

As travelers increasingly use greater discernment in how they allocate their travel budgets, choosing to spend less on this so they can spend more on that, the idea of lodging without the frills makes more and more sense. You don't need all of the bells and whistles of a posh hotel for a good night's sleep. Enter the pod and capsule concept. It began in Osaka in 1979. In 2014, the Antwerp Student Hostel (ASH) opened as Western Europe's first capsule hotel with prices from about $31 per night.

By definition, capsule hotels offer a private space in a shared room, like a hostel dorm, but in the case of ASH every effort is made to give that space a feeling of privacy. Each capsule is sound-proof and has private ventilation. The space has a locker and the showers are shared hostel-style. The ASH also offers the more traditional sleeping arrangement of bunk beds as well as a lobby space, a communal kitchen, a garden and a laundromat.

PodTime, a British developer, furnished Moscow's Anti-Hostel Cosmic with 3 feet by 7 feet pods that come with a bed, multiple electric outlets, ample ventilation and LED lighting as well as a large luggage locker. PodTime builds both indoor and outdoor pods. In Moscow you can stay at the Anti-Hostel Cosmic for about $38 per night. Outside Narita Airport's Terminal 2, you can get a capsule room for at the nine hours hotel priced at $38 for nine hours or for $15 per hour.

Rail Cruising in Japan

The enormous success of the $33 million Seven Star of Kyushu train in Japan is rewriting the future of rail in Japan. The Seven Star train sells out almost a year in advance and so unsurprisingly there's another such train on the way. JR East Company is working now to deliver a new luxury leisure rail cruise in 2017, called the Golden Experience, with a routing that has yet to be determined.

The 34-passenger Golden Experience was designed by Kiyoyuki Okuyama to look like an upscale hotel, with 10 cars decorated in a champagne gold color. The train will have a dining car and a lounge car partially made of glass for spectacular views of the Japanese landscape. Top-end accommodations will be located in a deluxe suite car, with two rooms. One of those rooms will have two stories, the second floor a tatami sitting room with a picture window to view the passing scenery.

This March, the Shinkansen (Bullet Train) service will begin connecting Tokyo to Hokuriku. Little known to Americans, the Hokuriku region just may rise into that upper tier of popularity with Tokyo and Kyoto now that it will be so easily reached.

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