It’s a fascinating time we’re living through, and for those of us who can afford the luxury of travel, global travel has never felt more transient. Now, it depends on which angle you look at it from.
If you are a businessperson who spends significant amounts of time jetting around the world, meeting clients, and has got to know a dozen or so key airports like the back of your hand, then airport layovers can feel like a chore.
Depending on the length of the layover, it can often feel like time is moving backward. Staying over in an airport like Heathrow, one of the world’s busiest, for eight or nine hours isn’t ideal, but there are plenty of things to do. If you have a 22-hour layover at an airport where you are sleeping on the floor, it can be a far more tedious affair.
Millions of people a day have to endure these layovers. However, the rise of digital media has overtaken more conventional forms of airport entertainment over the last quarter of a century, ramping up over the last decade in particular.
Microtransactions, mobile gaming, and the global gaming market are more borderless than ever. Today, we’re going to look at how travel became the unlikely battleground for gaming companies looking to establish themselves as a global brand.
Bringing A World From Black & White Into 8K
Yes, we know that 8K is not the highest resolution you can get, but if we’re going to throw a dart at a dartboard at abject metaphors to try and explain how airport entertainment has changed over the last couple of decades, then this is one of the most apt.
If you went through the vortex of international travel, even up until the early 2010s, it felt like a news vacuum. Planes did not have Wi-Fi; in-flight entertainment was extremely basic, with a handful of pre-selected movies or games like chess to pass the time on a long-haul flight.
You could be on a plane for 12 hours, and you’d have no idea what was happening on the ground. If you were going to another continent, you’d have to wait until you returned to get an idea of what was going on closer to home.
The goal was for media and entertainment to become ubiquitous, borderless, and once the internet ushered this in, airlines were chomping at the bit to integrate these ideas and make the process just that little bit smoother for their customers.
Using The Blueprint Of Big Terminals
In the early 2000s, there was a stark contrast between the world’s best airports and smaller transit airports. Chicago O’Hare is one of the busiest airports in the US. Still, in terms of layovers and entertainment, it does not hold a candle to Changi in Singapore, widely considered the best in the world for a long layover, or Dubai International.
Heathrow and Schiphol had areas where people could play casino games, for instance. Before internet casino gaming really took off, people could use their airport layover time to sit around and play a few spins of roulette table games available online. However, as this market has gravitated into the digital world, these areas of the airport have faded into obscurity, and online roulette brands have hoovered up the consumer base.
Airports quickly moved from notoriously bad internet connection hotspots to hubs of interconnectivity, with all sorts of tips, ranging from tips about airport parking to vlogs that give people detailed insight into how the airport works and what to look for. As you can see in the infographic below, the growth between 2005 and 2019 was astronomical.
Credit – infographic made with AI tools
For casino gaming companies, the rise of Wi-Fi mattered. People who travel across continents often and spend a lot of time in airports, more often than not, have the budget and time to seek out niche forms of entertainment that they are happy to spend money on, whether it is roulette or other types of online gaming.
The potential to play on the move has opened a world of possibilities, ranging from niche variants of the games themselves to alternative payment options such as cryptocurrency, as you can see in the link below.
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The whole market has become global and digital, and with airport layovers being one of the most arduous, painstaking processes that many travelers lament, the stars aligned for casinos looking to offer a bespoke experience for those with plenty of time to kill.
Luxury Travel Or Traveling With Your Luxuries?
If you’re anything like me and you enjoy watching travel videos on YouTube, it is a perfect window into how some of the ultra-rich choose to travel. For many of us, me included, the closest we will get to a business lounge in an airport or a fabled first-class cabin on a Singapore Airlines flight is by watching a smarmy, extroverted YouTuber getting the entire flight for free as part of a promotional strategy. No jealousy here, honestly.
We’ve seen how Airpoints and air miles have become alternative forms of currency for those aiming to work their way toward a first-class lounge visit eventually. However, for millions of people, the bar is lower, and that type of travel is too luxurious, unattainable, and in many ways, unnecessarily grandiose.
Final Thoughts
Simplicity and having the basics is the only recipe millions of travelers need. If we’re able to access Wi-Fi on a plane and in an airport, use translation apps, listen to our favorite podcasts, and play any game, whether it’s casino gaming or something more generic, then these are the only boxes we need to tick.
Sure, getting a massage, eating caviar, and sleeping in a queen-sized bed on a plane isn’t something we would turn down if we were offered it for the same price.
However, with one costing 30 times the price of the other, it is often the sum of the parts that matters most – and for millions of gamers, being able to play on the move, whether it be in the airport terminal or on the plane, is sufficient entertainment to tackle the boredom.
Given that casino games have played such a pivotal role in the development of online gaming over the last 20 years, it’s not a surprise to see how many people choose to play these types of games on the move in airports all over the world. It’s likely a trend that will continue for some time yet, as iGaming becomes more influential in the wider industry.
