If you’re on Facebook and/or Twitter, you already have a host of restaurant tips at your disposal: Ask members of your social network what restaurants they recommend in the city you plan to visit.
Those who live in that city will be able to give you a local’s perspective, and you will also hear from people who live elsewhere but have visited that city in the past.
Who knows? You might even find a dining companion or two!
[Photo: Flickr | Patrick Powers]
A new travel-planning website and booking engine is launching this month in beta, and I was excited to give it a test run, having first heard about the site this spring at a EuroCheapo travel happy hour. Wanderfly.com is a “personalized recommendation engine” that takes your interests, budget, and even social network connections to give you inspiration and help you plan your next vacation. Flights and hotels are pulled from Expedia, with restaurant recommendations, activities, and sightseeing descriptions culled from Lonely Planet, FourSquare, NileGuide, and Yelp.
Let’s say you have a week to travel in early September for Labor Day. Budget is under $1,000 per person for flights and hotels, and you’re interested in culture, beaches, and food. Plug all those into the search engine and you’ll get a series of destinations to review, refine, share, and book. While the site still has a few bugs (budget busters would sneak through the filters, the help feature is not fully enabled), the interface is slick and user-friendly, the features are thoughtful, and the content is reliable.
What’s cool about the site:
What will be cool about the site:
All in all, Wanderfly is a nifty new tool for dreaming and planning your next trip. If they could find a way to integrate time-sensitive deals, local blogs, and multiple-destination trips, this could be the only travel site you need.
We’ve put some distance between us and the September 2008 financial crisis, but unemployment – and tension the workplace – is still high. There’s plenty of anxiety over whether people appear to be working hard enough, because it’s safe to assume that the budgets being allocated or raises and bonuses are unlikely to be generous. So, in the quest to appear productive, employees need more tools. Thankfully, we have social media: use it wisely, and you can look wholly dedicated to your company and your job while you’re on vacation.
The trick, of course, is to look productive. Work through your vacation, and you give up an opportunity to relax … and risk annoying the friends or family traveling with you. I’ve written about tools you can use to look like you’re working even when you’re not, but the proliferation of social media options gives you new ways to snow your boss.1. Plan your lies
While you’re waiting at the gate or sitting on the plane, write out the tweets and Facebook status updates that make it look like you’re thinking about the office. Use brief mentions of activities that could look like work, such as “Taking quick look @ document before heading to pool”. Write enough so you have three or four a day (you don’t want to overdo it).
2. Schedule your tweets and status updates
Since you don’t want to give up vacation time to even the appearance of working, schedule your tweets and Facebook status updates. HootSuite’s my favorite, but there are other tools you can use, as well. I prefer HootSuite because I can hit Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn from the same place and schedule updates for each. Twitter may say you’re “taking quick look @ contract” but you’ll really be sipping something delightful on the sand.
3. “Favorite” tweets for @replying or retweeting later
Unfortunately, this requires that you actually do something while you’re on vacation, but it’s not as hard as it sounds (as long as you use a smartphone). While you’re waiting in line or running off to the bathroom, use a Twitter application (I use UberTwitter) to scan your stream and see if there is anything work- or business-related that you can retweet. Do some immediately, but mark most of the interesting tweets as favorites. When you get back to your hotel room, schedule the retweets over time, so it looks like you’re continually thinking about work.
4. Check in (with the office, that is)
Again, you can’t schedule this sort of behavior, but you can still fake it. During your flurries of @ replying and retweeting, dash off a few direct messages to key people at the office (peers are better than bosses, because I will seem more like real work) just to see how things are going and if anybody needs some help. The only risk is that you could get dragged into a conversation (or worse) if someone really does need a hnd.
5. Hire a helper
Find an unemployed liberal arts grad who’s willing to tweet and post for you for a few days. Pay him or her with access to your garage while you’re out of town and a hot meal when you get back. Hire a psych or philosophy major, and you can probably get away with cold pizza.
Where are you looking for the latest travel information? Well, if you’re a business traveler, especially with a mid-sized company, you’re probably turning to social media tools. And, that makes more than a little sense, given the reach of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter (the former of which pierced the 500 million-user mark this week).
According to the latest research by American Express Business Travel, the white collar crowd is turning to social media more and more to stay in touch with other travelers and keep up with travel industry developments. This is just the beginning, however. Down the road, many expect to use these online utilities to engage more directly in business, particularly through webcasts, forums and online video.
Basically, businesses will figure out how to put to work what kids have been doing for years. The good news? Since social media tools will become synonymous with work for this population, wasting time on Twitter won’t be fun any more, and the boss will recapture some productivity.
According to Christa Degnan Manning, director, eXpert insights, American Express Business Travel, “As businesses around the globe alter the way they communicate and receive information from clients and prospects, social media has also proven to be a useful and effective tool to share pertinent information with employees and drive change in organizations.”
Half of the respondents to the American Express Business Travel survey indicated that “they use social media to some extent to support travel management today,” and the proportion went up to 59 percent for mid-sized companies (defined as $3 million to $10 million in air volume).
So, why do they use social media tools? Forty-four percent say they want to stay up on the latest travel information, with 43 percent reporting that they can “learn and communicate best practices and reduce business travel costs”. Other priorities include finding preferred vendors and services (42 percent), hunting for travel patters that could result in improved rates or services (34 percent) and encouraging networking among travelers (26 percent).
What’s most horrifying about this research? Well, it’s that social media tools are becoming useful …time to kill that FarmVille account, right?
For the properties using social media, the effort seems to be paying off. Guests are using tools like Facebook to score discounted rates all over the country. This shouldn’t exactly be shocking, but since the travel industry lags other businesses, there’s a sort of novelty to the impact of promoting in these emerging online environments.
What’s interesting is that the greatest benefit may not be the booking itself, or the attendant revenue. Rather, it’s the subsequent online chest-puffing involved in telling the world you scored a great deal. Why? It’s electron-based word-of-mouth, which sends people over to the property’s Facebook page creating the potential for more clicks, bookings and braggadocio … to kick the cycle off again.