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Time To Tweet

Published: 17/10/2011 - Filed under: Home » Archive » October 2011 » Lifestyle » Home » Features »

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In a recent poll by our sister publication in the UK, businesstraveller.com, only about a third of readers used Twitter or Facebook to interact with travel companies. At the same time, airlines, airports and hotel brands are investing millions in social media. Why? Because they see it as an effective way to communicate with their customers.

“For many brands, the idea of giving customers a public forum where they can say anything can be a scary notion,” according to Bryan Gonzalez, director of the social entertainment lab at the University of Southern California’s Entertainment Technology Center. “But today, consumer reviews can happen anywhere on the web. If it happens on your Facebook page, you’re in a position to help solve any problems. Having these real conversations in public can help to build brand trust by demonstrating to your customers that they have a voice and that you’re ready to help.”

Steven Taylor, vice-president of marketing for Starwood Hotels and Resorts, agrees. “Customers are engaging with social media and using it to find hotels and engage with brands, so it’s important that we claim our ‘social real estate’,” he says. “One of the biggest opportunities is responding in real time to guests who are either tweeting or leaving comments on our Facebook page while they’re actually in one of our hotels.”

Starwood was an early adopter of Facebook, launching a presence on the site about five years ago, and has since generated more than 27,000 “likes,” and close to 31,000 followers on its @StarwoodBuzz Twitter profile. “A few years ago it was enough simply to have a blog and monitor flyertalk.com,” Taylor says. “But now the expectation is that you have a team monitoring the social media sphere 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The dynamics have changed and consumers’ expectations have advanced.”

Almost all of us are using social media to some degree – it was recently announced that Facebook has more than 750 million users, and more than 200 million 140-character tweets are being sent a day, or 2,314 per second. But as a professional, understanding how to use these sites in an efficient way is another matter. Considering that the top priorities of business travelers are saving time and money and accessing relevant information, the rewards from engaging with social media, which is immediate, free and tailored, should not be underestimated. 

Delta Air Lines launched its Twitter profile, @deltaassist, in May last year to offer flyers help before, during and after their trips. Delta did this because it realized passengers “wanted to be able to reach out, get a response and have whatever they needed resolved.” At the time of writing, their news and tips page @delta had about 220,000 followers and had sent roughly 3,500 tweets, while @deltaassist had fewer followers – roughly 30,000 – but had tweeted about 40,000 times, not including the hundreds, if not thousands, of direct messages it sends on a daily basis. 

Delta now has about 20 full-time employees updating its social media accounts and responding to queries 24 hours. Susan Chana Elliott, the airline’s senior manager of emerging media and corporate communications, notes that if you have a problem, contacting the carrier via Twitter could be quicker than sending an email or making a phone call. 

Questions range from flight delays to loyalty programs, which terminal a flight is departing from or how you can get your iPad back after leaving it on the plane. “We’ve even had a tweet saying there was no toilet paper in the bathroom at the airport,” Elliott says, “and we took care of it.”

Response time is one of the main selling points of using social media. KLM, which launched its Twitter page, @KLM, at the end of 2009 and now has about 155,000 followers, says that thanks to its 25-strong team it will reply to a traveler “in less than an hour and offer a solution to any problem within 24 hours.” 

Richard Bowden is digital marketing innovation manager for BA, which has two Twitter pages – @British_Airways, a global account with almost 100,000 followers, and @BritishAirways, for North America, with about 150,000. He says:  “We are removing any barriers that are stopping our experts responding to queries. If it’s a personal question then we will message them direct, but if it is a general question that we think will benefit the whole, we will broadcast that back.”

Ask hotel groups what people are tweeting about and the responses are equally broad. Virginia Suliman, vice-president of digital design and development at Hilton (about 3,500 followers on @HiltonWorldwide), says: “A traveler in New York may ask where to grab dinner and one of our team will tweet back with a recommendation.”

Starwood’s Taylor recalls one person tweeting: “It’s my wife’s 30th – I wonder if we’ll get a room upgrade? @Westin @Venice.” The hotel saw it and gave it to them at check-in. He says: “Clearly, we don’t want people fabricating birthdays, but we do want people to engage with us.” 

Airports are also discovering how they can use Twitter to keep travelers updated, especially via their smartphones. Atlanta’s feed, @Atlanta_Airport – is monitored Monday to Friday 9:00 AM - 6:00 PM; it offers directions and gate information. London Heathrow’s feed, @HeathrowAirport – which has about 55,000 followers and is staffed Monday to Friday 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM – will alert you to retail offers and celebrity sightings, as well as regular news. 

In addition, Twitter and Facebook have proved invaluable in times of crisis, such as during last winter’s heavy snowfall in Europe or this summer’s East Coast hurricanes, or even June’s invasion of turtles on the runways at JFK, which caused delays and got the terrapins their own Twitter account.

Still, you do have to be careful about what you tweet, especially in times of heightened security. There are numerous cases of complaints backfiring, such as when a man was arrested in January last year after joking that he was going to blow Doncaster airport “sky high” if his flight was late. 

Although Twitter may appear to benefit business travelers more than Facebook – which tends to be used more for marketing, in-depth discussions and photo sharing – some carriers are finding the latter a powerful tool. Scandinavian Airlines has about 95,000 Facebook likes compared with only 5,000 followers on @SAS. A recent survey it ran revealed that almost 80 per cent of its likes were from people in its frequent flyer program, almost half of whom were in the top tier. Christian Hansen Kamhaug, SAS’s head of social media, says: “Business travelers are engaging in social media but this is because they are not all 60-year-old men. In Scandinavia a lot are young professionals.” 

Last year, Delta became the first airline to allow passengers to search and make bookings through its Facebook page, which now has almost 200,000 likes. In February, Malaysia Airlines (about 370,000 likes) went a step further by introducing a function called “MHbuddy” that not only lets you search and book flights, choose your seat and check in, but see if any of your Facebook friends are on the same flight or in the same city. 

In June, flight comparison site Skyscanner unveiled its new tool, facebook.com/skyscannerflightsearch. It allows users to post flight queries such as, “A flight from London to Hong Kong on December 5,” after which it will reply with a comment and a link to the cheapest options. 

Using geo-location software on your smartphone, Facebook Places – a feature that enables users to earn rewards by “checking in” virtually to anything from restaurants and shops to galleries and airports – is also being used by hotels to engage with guests. Juliette Bruyere, social media junior project manager at Accor, which has close to 18,000 likes on its Facebook page, says: “One major initiative is to connect our A Club loyalty program to Facebook Places to reward customers who ‘check in’ during their stay with extra A Club points and exclusive badges.”

Radisson Edwardian, meanwhile, ran a promotion allowing guests to extend their check-out time by two hours if they checked in through Facebook Places or location-based social networking site Foursquare. 

Meanwhile, tech developers around the world are busy launching new services. Social networking site Google Plus was launched in June as a rival to Facebook and LinkedIn. After three weeks it already had 20 million users and, although it’s primarily for organizing friends and colleagues into social “circles,” there will be the option for businesses to create profiles in the future, too.

Quora, an “online knowledge market,” is also one to consider. Its beta start-up site went live to the public in June last year and within about six months had accumulated half a million users. While similar in some ways to forums, the advantage is that it encourages experts to provide replies, so if you are looking for information on highly specific topics, such as “What gives your typical commercial airline pilot the greatest anxiety during a flight?” or “What are the most addictive loyalty programs?” there will be someone who can tell you. 

One thing seems certain; social media as a traveler’s tool is no passing phase, but in a constantly shifting environment, there’s no guarantee it will look the same in the future. “There is no question that it is here to stay,” notes Gonzalez. “But will the future of social media be entirely on Facebook, Google Plus and Twitter? That is difficult to predict. How social media will grow in the travel industry will depend on the creativity and energy within the community to experiment with new ideas.” 

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