I have seen the future

DATELINE 2021. Departure Lounge makes a casual remark to Jetson, her 10-year-old grandson.

Illustratration: Jellett Tom

DATELINE 2021. Departure Lounge makes a casual remark to Jetson, her 10-year-old grandson, that when she was the travel editor of the leading national newspaper, what she hated most about staying at hotels was crawling under desks to find power outlets for her laptop.

He is intrigued. First, he wants to know how newspapers worked: their streaming capacities and connectivity speeds. Then he needs information on the concept of a desk - Lounge would draw him a picture, except in 2021 the world is paperless and no one has seen a writing implement since at least 2015.

Laptops? He thinks he saw one once. Next to a PlayStation. In a virtual museum.

Lounge is taking Jetson with her to review a new orbital space habitat in the Four Satellites chain at SoMa (South of Mars) for her virtual travel news provider, Cosmic Trails. On docking above the official smog line in her Toyota Asteroid with retractable moon roof, the virtual receptionist checks in Lounge and Jetson via a touch-display monitor the size of a drive-in cinema screen.

Lounge doesn't mention this drive-in comparison to Jetson, who already thinks his grandmother is from another planet - and make that from a galaxy long, long ago. He has long been confused by her odd name, too. A departure lounge? So last decade.

From the docking station, Lounge and Jetson will reach their orbital space habitat via one of those high-speed elliptical tube transporters that whoosh up with such effect that Lounge always feels like Jane Jetson en route to Spacely Sprockets.

But again she doesn't mention this to her grandson in case he discovers his grandmother bullied his parents to name him for a television show so ancient it's turned into The Flintstones.

Lounge and Jetson enter their accommodation pod via a retina-scanner. There is a molecular nanotechnology press-pad to configure the furniture exactly the way they want, although Lounge is surprised the orbital space habitat hasn't logged her bedding and seating preferences from previous visits to Four Satellites' member hotels; it's hardly 10-star service, more what you'd expect from Lord Richard Branson's mass-market inflatable habitat pods.

Various functions, such as the auto-refill mini-bar, are biometric, and Lounge notes the rehydrated Toblerones, peanuts dusted with Himalayan yak's-tear salt and bottled water from secret Aztec springs still carry Four Satellites' standard 3000 per cent mark-up.

Lounge takes images of the evidence with her Sony Cybershot DSC-TX500 camera mounted on her pinkie finger and beams them back to the 12-year-old chief content controller at Cosmic Trails for use on that day's multimedia platforms, including the Departure Lounge app, which is being progressively shut down due to age and irrelevance.

The accommodation pod, announces Jetson, is in serious need of re-engineering. Even Lounge can see that features such as flat-screen television on the ceiling over the hydro-bath, colour-therapy ultrasonic rainforest shower and Remote Jack Pack port are just so Paris Hilton hotels circa 2015 that it's pathetic.

The wall-sized screen in the sitting annexe, at least, has no channels to change or hand-held manipulator to lose under the seating modules. It works on voice recognition and Jetson can just tell it what he'd like to watch. Lounge decides to go to sleep early while Jetson looks at Namibia: not a program about it

Jetson is an alphabetical world traveller and is up to the Ns, although Lounge is not sure he'll be all that riveted by the images of Queen Angelina Jolie of Windhoek, who's telling the cosmos how she's just adopted her 1000th baby wildebeest and is calling it Brad.

As soon as Jetson thinks Lounge is out of earshot, he messages robot valet service via a microchip implanted in his index finger and orders a space-burger pill with no pickle. Some things never change.

Lounge's sleep capsule, made out of reconstituted hotel keycards and antiquarian Dan Brown novels, has temperature control features, a float mattress that instantly moulds to her body shape and a hydrotherapy function that releases clouds of skin-cleansing steam.

Lounge can tell the capsule has been designed by Philippe Starck, who has recently been brought out of cryonic preservation. To celebrate his comeback, he has purchased inter-galactic rights to the colour white.

The capsule also has a fragrance facility that produces such scents as simulated lavender, a plant that has been extinct for almost a decade. Even the most ardent environmentalists couldn't save lavender after the Great Spa Explosion of 2012.

Oriental windchimes almost suffered the same fate last year when federal tourism minister Lara Bloody Bingle called on her fellow Australians to support domestic tourism and stop taking Virgin Galactic 50c flights to silly foreign places such as Feng Shui.

Meanwhile, Jetson's parents, Lounge's elder son and his interplanetary bride, are teleporting to Malawi to work as volunteers for Paramount Chief Madonna's long-established program to ensure that no African child will have to live without a Samsung Galaxy Smartphone20 or iPad25 by the year 2025.

Then they are off to the Antarctic on a submarine with an air-independent propulsion system and low-maintenance hydroponic garden by Jamie Durie Jr. They'll be checking into a heritage-listed resort that won a Hotel of the Future award back in 2006. The structure hangs under the ice shelf and is wind-powered by a giant turbine and held in place by electromagnetic forces.

The space cadet designer originally called it "an inside-out aquarium" and Lounge is embarrassed to admit she laughed when she heard about it, and so did the then federal tourism minister Fran Bloody Bailey, who called on her fellow Australians to support domestic tourism and what was the matter with motels and crocodile farms anyway.

Jetson slides into his adjoining capsule and after checking the microchip atlas in his big toe, asks if he can go to virtual New Zealand tomorrow. At this rate, he reckons by next month he'll be viewing the ruins of what once was Zimbabwe.

This is an edited and supplemented version of a speech made by Susan Kurosawa to a travel seminar five years ago. Only the technology has changed.