Share your travel deals with friends with Yapta’s Frugal Travel Flaunts

by Katie Hammel on

Yapta, a website that tracks prices and helps you figure out when to book your airfare, has launched a new Facebook application called Frugal Travel Flaunts. When you find a deal on a flight and add it to “my trips”, you can choose to publish it on your Facebook page, alerting all your friends to your great find.

The idea behind the app is pretty solid. How many times have you found out about the amazing low-cost flight a friend found, but too late? Hearing that my friend spent just $300 on a round trip ticket from Chicago to London after she gets back from the trip doesn’t help me take advantage of the same deal. And likewise, I feel bad when friends ask why I didn’t share the news of my cheap fare purchase with them. The Frugal Travel Flaunts application allows you to use social media to alert your friends to good deals and helps you score your own with a few easy clicks.

Yapta will also help you get a credit if a flight you’ve already purchased drops in price. The site will alert you to the fare decrease with a link that sends you to the page on their site with credit info. You can also “flaunt” that on your Facebook page, though I see that as a less useful tool. Sharing news on killer deals is one thing, boasting about refunds is another – there’s a fine line between a flaunt and a taunt.

Three for Free promotion at 18 Hyatt hotels

by Alison Brick on

If you’re staying at a Hyatt hotel this fall and you want a little extra pampering, you’ll want to know about their Three for Free promotion.

What’s included? A free night, room upgrade, and daily breakfast. The free night is based on either a three-, four-, or five-night stay, depending on the specific hotel.

Unfortunately, it’s not available at all of their hotels–only 18 of them. Two international hotels are available, though: Aruba and Cancun. The other domestic locations range from Kauai to Chesapeake Bay.

And if you become a fan of the promotion on Facebook, you can get an additional welcome gift as part of your stay.

The promotion is valid for travel from September 8th to December 18th, 2009.

[Thanks, NYTimes.com]

Airlines and social media: dialogue waiting to happen

by Tom Johansmeyer on

Social media means that airlines just have another place where they can be raked over the coals. We complain to ticket agents. We complain to gate agents. We complain to customer service reps. And now, we can complain to the world, thanks to the likes of Twitter. I, for example, follow @DeltaSucks, though there hasn’t been any action on it in several months. I don’t just listen, though. When I’m stuck in an airport, I tweet relentlessly, and I know I’m not alone.

So, what’s an airline to do about this? And Facebook? And YouTube?

The attack is coming on all fronts, and an industry that’s been beaten up so severely and so often has few options. For now, the response is limited to tweeting fare deals, but obviously, that does little to address the continued stream of negative exposure to which the airlines are subjected.

When in doubt, the philosophy on social media complaints appears to be silence. Continental and American Airlines wouldn’t comment on recent tweets from disgruntled fliers, according to a Reuters report. They are monitoring and claim to be responding, but that’s about all. Billy Sanez, who manages social media for American’s parent, AMR, believes that these platforms make it easier to open a dialogue with passengers … but where is that dialogue?

When I got pissed off at JetBlue a year ago, I wrote about it on my personal blog and heard nothing from JetBlue. But, I did hear from other passengers … one of whom was afraid to say too much because he was still in transit and didn’t want to risk angering the airline. This level of paranoia may be extreme, but the implication is clear: passengers could find even a small blog, but airlines are squandering a chance to really engage the people who pay their bills.

Christi Day, who takes care of Twitter and Facebook for Southwest Airlines, told Reuters, “The main thing that our customers need to know is that we hear them.” But, again, there is no discussion of what the airline is doing about it.

Customers finally have a voice, and as we saw with “United Breaks Guitars,” it can get pretty loud. While the airlines may be listening, we’re still waiting for the second half of “dialogue” to happen.

Social network jokes result in 13 Virgin Atlantic employees being fired

by Scott Carmichael on

13 Virgin Atlantic cabin crew members have found themselves in hot water (and without a job) after they posted inappropriate jokes about their employer on social networking site Facebook.

The jokes involved the crew members calling passengers “chavs” (the British equivalent of the US Redneck) and making jokes about faulty engines that had to be replaced 4 times a year. Other jokes claimed that Virgin Atlantic planes were full of cockroaches.

The Facebook group was setup by crew members based out of Gatwick airport. When Virgin Atlantic discovered the Facebook group, all 13 members were fired and the Facebook group was removed.

While the punishment may seem a little harsh, Virgin Atlantic is in a very competitive market, where jokes like this could cost a significant amount of money.

Virgin Atlantic has a more friendly (and official) Facebook page, with close to 7000 friends as well as links to their hottest deals and some video footage from a Virgin Atlantic cameo in the newest Bond movie.

Guess who else has been naughty in the air?


Are you “that” slow walker?

by Grant Martin on

Ninety eight percent of the time, I’m the slowest guy on the sidewalk. People walking with me hate me for it, but I can’t help it — I’ve always been a bit of an ambler. One of the only exceptions to this rule is when I’m in the subway or airport; something about wanting to get to the gate or the business lounge makes me come full circle around the spectrum and nearly sprint to my destination.

In that case, I’m frequently dodging around tourists and slow walkers, telepathically trying to push them out of my way so I can get past.

This used to bother me. Why are these people stopping in the center of the sidewalk? Why are they standing on the left side of the escalator? Completely unacceptable.

Well, apparently I’m not the only person who is (or was) bothered by this. A few months back, perusing a friend’s Facebook account I saw that he was a member of the group “I Secretly Want to Punch Slow Walking People in the Back of the Head.”

There are 712,085 members. I had no idea that people got that fired up about it.

Since browsing the ranks of that group, I’ve slowly grown forgiving of the slow walkers in front of me during my travels. Perhaps because I know I’m sometimes a perpetrator myself; perhaps because I didn’t realize how intense some people were about it.

But I still keep to the right on the escalator.