How Travelocity, Expedia and TripAdvisor are leveraging social media

“Everyone’s using and talking about social media marketing these days” has become a clichéd statement these days. With the growing trend, people are more interested to know how specific sectors and companies are leveraging social networks. 

In the last few months, besides FMCG and retail brands I have noticed some interesting ways of leveraging these platforms specially by travel and hospitality companies. I came across an interesting article by Rik Fairlie, the famous tech blogger. Rik has covered consumer electronics and technology products and trends for numerous publications, including The New York Times, CNET, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Computer Shopper, where he was editor in chief. He has also written extensively about the social and consumer side of the Web, as well as the business of technology. Prior to writing about technology, Rik wrote for various travel magazines.

In this interesting article he has covered interesting case examples on 

‘How OTAs exploit social media’

Here are some of the main points that caught my attention:

Preeminent online travel sites like Travelocity, Expedia, as well as TripAdvisor, are piggybacking on social networking to direct more and more travelers to their sites.

TripAdvisor, which gets 35 million traveler reviews, created the Trip Friends application on Facebook which harnesses the concept of Facebook's social graph to enable trip planners to get travel reviews and ask questions to trusted friends.
The Facebook social graph aggregates all available information—places your friends have visited and lived, for instance—and generate a list of friends with knowledge of a particular destination. More than 500,000 people are now using Facebook Connect on TripAdvisor.

Travelocity, the second largest online travel agency (OTA), has an exceptional spokesman for its social networking: its popular Roaming Gnome mascot. It recently launched a campaign that gives fans of the Gnome’s Facebook page, exclusive discounts. The page also has a Travel Deals tab that plots hotel and flight promotions on a U.S. map, displaying specific packages from your home airport without leaving the Facebook site. If you decide to book a trip, you are directed to Travelocity's site.

Travelocity has leveraged Facebook to engage its fans to vote in contests to decide the most popular vacation spots—and promote air and hotel deals to those destinations.

It has more than 29,000 followers on Twitter and has regional accounts that enable it to more effectively target the right destinations for users. It also uses Twitter to send out promotional codes for breaking travel deals, as well as for customer service initiatives.

Expedia uses Twitter for the same purpose and maintains 28,000 followers. It also flags "hidden gems" that are hand-picked by company employees and may be overlooked by site visitors, who are intently focused on searching for components of a specific trip they are planning.
It counts around 11,400 fans on its Facebook fan page. The company sends these fans deals every day and points users to its TripTips blog, written by Expedia staff. But it also uses Facebook to build a community of reader comments and feedback about travel opinions and tips.

Pushing a coupon to travelers carrying smart phones with GPS capabilities, present in close proximity of the stores is another rising trend.


Future plans of the OTAs:

• Travelocity is working on a campaign to include the Roaming Gnome on FourSquare.
• Expedia and TripAdvisor are working on the development of location-based services.
• TripAdvisor is carefully watching the augmented reality space waiting for the users’ response to the new technology before going ahead with it. But for now it is concentrating on building an app for Android devices expected this summer.

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