We all know that Twitter has become a global phenomenon and the uses of it are changing everyday. What’s interesting though, is what people are choosing to do with it, and what uses work best for them. It is no longer just about catching up with your friends daily activities or keeping up with the constant stream of irrelevant information John Mayer is sharing with the world at any given moment. Nope, people are actually using it to make decisions.
Case in point – using Twitter for travel. Based on an article from the April issue of Travel + Leisure magazine, it is now becoming a common trend to book travel based on Tweets. Instead of searching through travel sites, users are turning to Twitter and their friends “tweets” to decide where they want to go, where they want to stay, and even how they want to get there.
Twitter offers users the ability to find information about hotels, destinations, restaurants, and airfare deals – all by way of direct feeds from those that users follow. I myself often book travel based on what my friends tell me and make my decisions from their experiences and recommendations. Twitter is giving users the same option, only virally, and exposing them to a much larger knowledge bank.
One man planned an entire trip from tips and information he acquired from his fellow Tweeters. Traveling from England to New Zealand over a 30-day span, his transport and accommodations were booked solely based on suggestions from the Twitter community.
Hotels, restaurants, and destinations are jumping on board too, reaching out directly to potential travelers, starting conversations with their customers in an informal manner, and encouraging responses. Developing this open dialogue in turn offers users who prefer social networking sites, and information based on actual experience, a place to turn to, ultimately causing these hotels and destinations to offer up more information via Twitter, then any of their other outlets.
To read the entire article, http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/using-twitter-for-travel
