Is Pokemon Go going to influence travel more than Brexit?

Let me start by saying that I know very little about either Pokemon or politics apart from my boys collecting Pokemon cards when they were much younger. What I do know that many people think that Brexit may affect peoples travel plans due to possible price rises of package holidays or flights or a weakened  sterling – time will tell although it doesn’t seem to be stopping people from booking cruises at the moment I can tell you.

So over dinner tonight I have just had the most bizarre conversation with my two, now 20 something, boys which lead me to think that what they were discussing could impact travel in a very positive way indeed. This new Pokemon app thingy. It’s a bit like Geo Caching if you know what that is. The app is on your phone and when you get to a Pokespot it registers on the app and you have to get to as many places as possible – along with incubating eggs, joining gyms and goodness knows what else – bear with me here I really don’t know what I am on about, can you tell? Here is the BBC summing it up:

“Pokemon Go is an augmented reality game on smartphones.It uses your GPS. You play by walking around the real world catching cutesy little virtual monsters like Pikachu and Jigglypuff in places near your phone location and training them to fight each other.”

My youngest son Tom had just been out walking the dog and had never seen our local churchyard so busy (small parish church in rural Worcestershire), apparently our churchyard is somewhere you can catch one of these characters, a Pokestop if you please. Then having caught some of these characters you need to find a ‘gym’ in the same way so that the characters can battle which raises your level so I am told. This app has been available in UK, Australia, New Zealand and the US for about 5 days and is proving so popular that the servers keep crashing!

Some weird things have been happening to participants, an American woman found a dead body in a river near her home while out looking for a Pokemon, people are sustaining injuries while they play because they are so busy looking at their phone they are not looking where they are going, and anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church in the US is actually the site of a ‘gym’ on the app and players painted a pink Clefairy, one of the characters, on the wall of the church . The church was totally unimpressed!

My eldest son Rhys is apparently more successfully incubating and hatching his eggs than his younger brother Tom. I suggested that sitting on your phone to warm it up might help but this was not well received by either of them.

I am told there is a huge ‘meet’ expected in Sydney Harbour tonight, about 5000 people all trying to catch the Pokemon character who is in the vicinity, and there was an incident in Auckland Harbour involving a lifeboat and four girls in a small craft trying to find a ‘waterspot’. This is all beyond me really, I haven’t a clue what I am going on about but Rhys tells me to “keep it relevant Mom”, this is such a huge craze that we are going to see a massive increase in people travelling the world to reach as many Pokespots as possible! Really? Is it going to be that big? It certainly looks that way at the moment. I mean if crowds are flocking to my small village graveyard then just think how keen people are going to be to get to Pokemon characters at major landmarks around the world!

So to sum up, I think any fears that Brexit may cause a downturn in travel can be allayed by this latest Pokemon craze which is bound to create an upsurge in travel. Rhys predicts that I can expect a sudden influx of people booking cruises in order to reach far-flung corners of the world, and the Pokespots thereabouts. I’ll keep you posted. Apparently I am very current blogging on this topic 🙂

If you would like to discuss cruising as always please get in touch on 0800 408 6084 or email me at [email protected] and I will be delighted to talk to you. For information on the Pokemon App I am probably not the best person to talk to, try asking a teenager!

Happy Cruising Folks!