I’m in the midst of planning my annual post Christmas vacation and haven’t decided where I’m going to go, but I know it will be somewhere abroad. I’ve narrowed the destinations, but have a small interest in talking with a travel agent that can help with some logistics.
On Sunday afternoon I sent an inquiry to A Way To GoTravel, a local agency in my hometown of Greensboro, NC. As of lunchtime Monday I hadn’t received a response so I sent the following tweet,
“Anyone know a good travel agent? Typically plan trips myself, but interested in talking to someone about South Africa.”
I had a near immediate response from @iNvest4you saying,
“The staff at A Way to Go Travel on Wendover are great.”
That was nice to hear, but I had already sent them an inquiry. About 1.5 hours after sending the tweet I received a reply from @spiritoftravel saying,
“I’d love to help plan your trip! DM me.”
I didn’t know who this person was, but after a quick check of their Twitter profile and Web site I realized they worked for The Travel Network, a travel agency that claims to be a “travel agency for the 21st century.” I was intrigued so we exchanged a few short messages on Twitter and then moved the conversation to email.
Bam – just like that I had someone willing to proactively help me.
I couldn’t help but wonder how @spiritoftravel tracked me down so I asked. Apparently she did a Twitter keyword search for “travel agent,” good move.
Around 4 pm I received a call from A Way To Go, but the gentleman that called handles corporate travel and needed to have someone else get in touch with me. He took down some information, but as of 10 pm last night I hadn’t heard from anyone.
They are supposedly a great company to work with, but I hope you see how slow the process (when compared to the proactive effort of The Travel Network) has seemed thus far, when in reality that might not be the case.
Let’s circle back to the keyword search that The Travel Network did. At a minimum I suggest that companies do two things:
- Set up Google Alerts for the business name and possibly keywords that pertain to the industry
- Use a social media monitoring service such as Filtrbox to monitor the same keywords that were set up with Google
During these tough economic times I can’t help but imagine that the travel agency business is a tough industry. It will be quite interesting to see if the company that tracked me down via a Twitter search get’s my business over the local company that I reached out to more than a day ago.
[…] perfect example would be my previous post about trying to use a local travel agency, A Way To Go Travel. My inclination is that they don’t […]