Here is an interesting article about how social media influence consumers in their travel decision. Again we are facing the monopolization of social medias in almost every industry because almost every customers have to check what is said about an hotel or an airline company before they decide where to go. The ITLM (International Luxury Travel Market) has gathered last week to again state that social medias (especially Facebook and Twitter) are very important for travelers and even for the elite. Nowadays social medias rule our lives and we cannot live without them; everything is regulated by the Internet world and social media are a mean for consumers to gather and explain their opinion. Everybody is telling his life on these social medias and people like to hear about these stories but it has a real impact on the travel industry because people tell more about their bad experience than about the good ones.
Social medias have two faces: it can have a very good impact or a very bad one. The travel industry needs customers to express their opinion and to give good advice about their trip. However, some people can pull apart the industry with some bad experiences. Often bad experiences are worse than the good ones because the impact is even more important on customers, they remember more a bad comment.
Social media can be evil for the travel industry.
Social media is a way for companies/hotels to promote themselves in two ways : first directly thru their page, for example a hotel where I did an internship posted a promotional offer of one free night for each new fan, that was a way to attract more fans, and these fans will then get updates of the hotel since they are now part of their page, the hotel had an empty date, so that allowed them to rise their occupation rate and gave them the chance to gain new customers. Second, as this article states, people post on their walls via status updates or share directly links, of experiences they liked, which gives the destination/hotel page in question more traffic, so more chances to gain new customers.
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