Will your Social Presence Get you A Travel Deal?

Many industries have been trying for quite some time to figure out how their customer’s social influence can help them reach more people, more importantly reach the right people.

But rarely do they offer a true benefit to their customers to serve as ambassadors.

I have worked on projects where we have paired the right people with our clients. We have identified influencers and established metrics to track our efforts. Measuring progress can be tricky because you want to take a more qualitative approach.

In summary, you want better customers and their friends.

There are many tools out there like Klout that measure interactions. I believe these tools struggle with measuring influence. There is a quantitative side that they can read well but the qualitative side is still a bit off.

Will your Social Profile Land You A Deal

As I browsed over my Feedly (blog reader), I stumbled upon a web app that does this for hotels.

Hotelied claims to get you hotel discounts based on your social influence.

I went over to the website and signed up to Hotelied.com beta. The overall design is clean and very user friendly.

They are collecting information from your airline rewards and hotel rewards accounts. I believe it’s a smart move when it comes to negotiating offers with their sponsors.

It also syncs up to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other social profiles. With the right strategy, you can get an idea of where users of the are planning to travel. This creates opportunity to offer them relevant ads on their next travel stops.

The only thing I found a bit worrisome is that they request for your password and login credentials for airline and hotel rewards.

It is not clear if the airlines and hotels featured have agreed to share that information (I hope they have).

I believe they should set up an API with those partners. That way, the user only shares information and not their password credentials.

I will be observing Hotelied and seeing how it progresses. I am interested in seeing how those who nurture large social followings, benefit from Hotelied.

This is a great opportunity to bring someone to your tourist destination. The large opportunity is making sure they have an engaged audience to bring some of their friends along in the future.

What are your thoughts on this type of online tool?