How did airlines help their customers through the weather chaos?
It’s been a week of extreme weather both here and the other side of the Atlantic. Not surprisingly, travel plans have been scuppered. Making a trip by air was one of the toughest challenges – and how have many customers been expressing their frustrations? Twitter of course! Skift, the website focused on all things digital/travel, dug into the stats and showed which airlines coped well with the influx of social media complaints and enquiries. American Airlines once again came out on top – sending over 1800 tweets in one day! Other airlines chose to deal with customer woes by sending users to a dedicated web page – another valid response. Another great example of social media platforms being used as a direct customer/brand communication tool.
Low cost hotel chain, Ibis, released a Vimeo trailer for a new film in a bid to refresh its image. The snippet follows a group of five adventurers who have been challenged to trek through the jungle in Brazil with an Ibis hotel bed. The aim? To get the ‘ultimate sleep’ absolutely anywhere. Stay tuned, folks.
Spending the afternoon in a café writing up your latest travel memoirs on your blog might become more of a regular thing with the opening of London’s first pay-per-minute café Ziferblat. This Russian chain offers complementary food, coffee and a comfy sofa, while guests, armed with an alarm clock, are only required to pay a mere 3p per minute for their time spent there. For only £1.80 an hour, could this be the café of global travellers’ and creative souls’ dreams?
On the topic of coffee and cafes…Starbucks coffee could be just a tweet away. Starbucks has adopted a new way of using Twitter to send coupons, turning the social media platform into a gifting platform. Starting today, Starbucks customers in Canada can sign up at www.starbucks.ca/tweetacoffee to link their Starbucks and Twitter accounts using a credit card. Then they can gift others on Twitter simply by typing @tweetacoffee, followed by the person’s Twitter handle. The person receiving the gift gets a link to a coupon which can be printed or downloaded onto their mobile phone using the Starbucks app. Given the Polar Vortex currently enveloping the US and Canada at the moment we’re thinking that at least one or too cold Canucks will jump onboard faster than you can say Moose and Maple Syrup.
This week saw the unveiling of Twitter founder, Biz Stone’s, new venture, entitled ‘Jelly‘. The biggest selling point of the new social network is it bridging the gap until we have a solid visual search engine – something Google is fiercely working on. The idea is that Jelly becomes a ‘Shazam’ for images by asking other users what it is you’ve spotted, relying on other people’s knowledge rather than algorithms to get the answers you need – you see something unusual, take a snap and share on the site and wait for the answers to come back to you.
Bev
Editor in chief Bev Fearis has been a travel journalist for 25 years. She started her career at Travel Weekly, where she became deputy news editor, before joining Business Traveller as deputy editor and launching the magazine’s website. She has also written travel features, news and expert comment for the Guardian, Observer, Times, Telegraph, Boundless and other consumer titles and was named one of the top 50 UK travel journalists by the Press Gazette.
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