Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder,

and this one's a little bit special because I'm in the good company of Kate Dootson,

who is the Chief Executive, Joint Chief Executive of Cosmic UK,

which sounds Kate very exciting. What exactly do you do?

So we are all about digital transformation. We support organisations to understand and create a

strategy around transformation and then build the right skills, build the right technology to

really move people forward. So that's what we're all about.

Now, as I just said, this is a travel podcast. What on earth have you got to do with travel then?

Well, we spend a lot of time with travel organisations from DMOs, right through to local

B&Bs, helping all of those to really understand and grasp what it means to be a tourism organisation in this digital world.

OK, DMO, by the way, destination marketing organisation, B&B, bed and breakfast, but you knew that bit.

What I'm keen to understand from you, Kate, is how the tourist experience is going to change. For example, am I just

going to put on a funny pair of glasses and not have to go anywhere because I've got everything on

virtual reality? It's not really what we're expecting in the next 10 years. Over the, over the next

decade, we're expecting to see virtual reality particularly at specific stages of the travelling journey.

So let's say you arrive at a destination and you want to know more about, or you go to a particular hotspot,

and you want to know more about the history of that hotspot.

Instead of reading an interpretation board, we can put on a VR

headset, we can go back in time, we can see and feel what it looks like, and we can truly

experience it in truly in three dimensions in that sort of space. Well, except that a Luddite like me

would say, yeah, well, I'm not really truly experiencing, am I? I'm experiencing

a fantastic 3D digital representation of it. Yeah, but there's a real interesting piece around

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