Booking a flight? Go on Facebook. Running late to the hotel? Send a tweet. Hotels, airlines and other segments of the multibillion-dollar travel industry are aggressively tapping into social media, ramping up their use of online sites such as Facebook and Twitter to build loyalty to their brands. Airlines are maintaining a presence onYouTube and offering deals through [...]

US-based Delta Airlines secured nothing if only bragging rights last week when it unveiled the world’s first airline booking engine within Facebook. Obvious questions came over its effectiveness as a marketing tool, value to the consumer, impact on its existing booking channels and integration (or not) with existing social media features on Facebook. The answers to all of [...]

There are myriad sites out there already that help to connect travellers—those using the same airlines, for example, or wanting to share a cab—but typically such connections are fleeting, and they aren’t made until the trip is under way. Globetrooper, on the other hand, lets world travellers find like-minded companions to share a jointly planned group trip. Globetrooper [...]

Facebook has unveiled its Facebook Places location-based check-in service this week. The new offering allows users to broadcast their location to the web, track their friends’ movements and see who else has checked-in to a specific location. The optional service, available initially in the US, will also allow users to tag their friends in posts, [...]

Airlines are beefing up their presence on networking channels, and travelers’ groups like FlyerTalk.com have created new applications that allow members to find one another while on the road.Business travelers can use these services to share cabs to the airport, swap advice or locate colleagues in the same city. As Mr. Jarvis puts it, “finding [...]

Finally Air France got its official facebook page. One more airline going social … Incoming search terms for the article:air france facebookfacebook air franceair france official facebook pageair france facebook pageair france official facebookairfrance facebookfacebook airfrance

Virgin America has partnered with Klout, an analytics service that tracks users’ influence on Twitter (based on variables such as the quality and number of followers and retweets), to extend free flights (plus tax) to influencers in Toronto. The offer includes free round-trip airfare (Wi-Fi included) between Toronto and San Francisco (SFO) or Los Angeles (LAX) [...]

Trend Watching posted its June briefing about Mass Mingling. Long gone are the days when ‘online’ was synonymous with social isolation and loneliness. In fact, we’re now witnessing the exact opposite: technology is driving people to connect and meet up en masse with others, in the ‘real world’. It makes for an interesting, easily-digested trend, begging [...]

Social media is increasingly becoming an essential communication tool for the travel industry, according to Abacus International, a provider of travel solutions and services. The recent Icelandic volcanic eruption demonstrated the power and reach of social media tools such as Twitter. During the six-day calamity, travellers who were stuck in airports tweeted about their predicament [...]

Barbara E. Hernandez was monitoring how well the travel industry is getting its message out via social media. While many companies have corporate blogs, others have antiblogs with far more visibility than the company or don’t know how to useTwitter and Facebook to reach out to the average person, leading me to believe that few in the travel industry know how [...]

How can airlines optimize social media content for maximum conversion? View more presentations from Shashank Nigam.