Future transhumanist technologies impacts on tourism experiences

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to offer an exploratory qualitative perspective on how transhumanist technologies may shape future tourism experiences. It investigates how tourism experts and travelers imagine tourism in a transhumanist reality and the implications for experience design, authenticity, access and data governance. Design/methodology/approach This research draws on sociotechnical imaginaries theory and uses 4 focus groups with 22 tourism experts and travelers. Participants discussed how transhumanist technologies could influence future tourism, generating temporally oriented visions of technological integration. Findings The analysis reveals three temporal visions of future tourism: near-term augmentation (2026–2029); medium-term embodied integration (2030–2039); and long-term postbiological speculation (2040 and beyond). In the near-term vision, participants associate cognitive, sensory and bodily enhancement with more personalized, accessible and demanding tourist experiences. In the medium-term vision, they imagined brain–computer interfaces, memory-sharing systems, affective data and bioengineered mobility as reshaping how tourists anticipate, record, share and physically access experiences. In the long-term vision, participants speculated about memory manipulation, digitally mediated embodiment, posthuman forms of experience, labor displacement and unequal access to enhancement. Across these visions, the findings show how transhumanist tourism may involve not simply intensifying experiences but also new tensions around authenticity, embodiment, social interaction, data governance and accessibility. Originality/value This paper qualitatively explores future-oriented visions of transhumanist tourism and advances tourism futures research through a temporal capability-augmentation framework. The framework examines how actors imagine near-, medium- and long-term futures linked to cognitive, emotional, sensorial and conative capabilities. It also reconceptualizes sociotechnical imaginaries as emerging future-oriented visions rather than established collective imaginaries.