World Tourism Blog

One evening last summer, 450 people snagged round-trip airline tickets to Europe for a mere $250, including taxes. The spectacularly low fares were available for only a few hours; by the next morning, Delta had discovered its pricing glitch and hiked the fare again. How did those people learn about the deal in time?

By following Rick Seaney, CEO of FareCompare.com, on Twitter. Other lucky travelers last summer were able to nab $9 JetBlue tickets from JFK to Nantucket and $444 round–trips on United from the West Coast to Australia. How? By watching JetBlue and United onTwitter: Those airlines are giving their followers first dibs on some of their steepest sales.

You may know Twitter only as the butt of late-night comedians’ jokes, and if you haven’t spent much time on Twitter, it’s easy to dismiss it as a silly social-networking fad for narcissists telling one another what they ate for lunch.

But I’ve been on Twitter for more than a year now, and I’m here to tell you that the perks you can glean from it are no joke. Ignore it and you’ll miss out on significant travel benefits, including deals you can’t find elsewhere.

The trick to Twitter is figuring out who to follow—meaning, whose Twitter updates (”tweets”) to receive. Follow the right people and you’ve got an instant personalized travel news feed on your mobile phone or computer. Hard money training.

A Seattle woman tweets from an airport that JetBlue’s birthday present to her was forgetting to put her wheelchair on her flight. Seven minutes later, an airline official tweets back that the crew will work quickly to make things right.

On a Facebook page used by Delta Air Lines, a traveler suggests Delta wrap its Wi-Fi fee into its ticket price rather than charge separately. The airline doesn’t respond. The page mainly promotes the airline, talks up new services and offers travelers tips on popular things to do in the cities Delta flies to, like Las Vegas.

Discount airlines have traditionally outflanked the big network carriers in customer service and low fares, and it appears they’re extending their advantage to social media. The discounters often respond with quick feedback to travelers’ concerns on social networking sites, while traditional network carriers peddle last-minute fare deals but seem slow to embrace Twitter and Facebook to beef up customer service.

Customers crave good service and reward airlines that provide it.

A survey cited in a July report by Forrester Research showed that 68 percent of U.S. online leisure travelers say they’d be willing to recommend carriers to family and friends if the company made them feel like a valued customer.

That’s a tantalizing incentive for airlines to transform customer service from the dull telephone and e-mail route into the online networking channel — where every customer can speak his mind to the masses — at a time when the weak economy has caused their revenue to plummet.

The Internet has opened the door to millions of people to beam their views across the planet on everything from the quality of airplane food to how long they waited on the tarmac to take off. This presents a conundrum for some airlines.

It takes manpower to troll social networking sites that are updated around the clock. JetBlue has 10 people involved with social networking; Southwest Airlines has seven. But the big carriers, with their higher costs, have faced budget cuts and reductions in management and frontline staff. US Airways, for instance, in July said it would eliminate 340 customer service agent positions around the country. Hard money training