When a visa snafu marooned honeymooners Bethany Thomas and Dmitri Zagidulin in Frankfurt en route to St. Petersburg last week, their journey had all the makings of a disaster: a tepid response from their travel agency, Expedia, a closed consulate and luggage that had gone on to Russia without them.
Alerted by a blog post from Thomas (a fantasy writer in Peaks Island, Maine, who goes by the name Catherynne M. Valente), the author's supporters launched a volley of calls and online missives to Expedia. And less than 24 hours after the duo's drama began, they were headed to Russia with a promised refund of their $2,000 trip, reimbursement for last-minute visas and other expenses in Frankfurt, plus a $3,000 credit for future travel — thanks to the power of Twitter and Facebook.
Their happy ending is "a huge triumph for social networking," says Thomas, who met her Ukraine-born computer programmer husband online in 2003. "Without it, we'd still be stranded in Frankfurt."
Expedia spokesman Adam Anderson says the agency should have directed the couple to the U.S. State Department's site instead of reassuring them that they didn't need visas. Adds Expedia customer service senior director Thomas Seibert, "Social media played an important role in alerting us to our error."
The horror honeymoon-turned-fairy tale is another example of how travelers are using social media to help solve problems. Writes IndependentTraveler.com's Ed Hewitt: "Calling the 800 number and sitting on hold for 45 minutes waiting for your complaint to be heard isn't your only option anymore."
This summer, months after baggage handlers at United Airlines broke Dave Carroll's guitar and United refused to pay for the $1,200 repair, the Canadian singer fought back with a music video titled United Breaks Guitars that has been viewed about 6 million times on YouTube. United now uses the incident in training baggage handlers and customer-service representatives — and made more news by losing Carroll's luggage on a recent flight from Saskatchewan to Denver.
Also on the airline front, six JetBlue staffers monitor missives from the company's 1.4 million Twitter followers. In one incident, a JetBlue passenger tweeted about not being able to get a seat assignment next to his child; the airline responded while the passenger was still in the boarding area.
Southwest, which has about 853,000 Twitter followers, is adding about 3,000 new followers a month. Notes spokeswoman Christi Day: "Twitter is a great place to have your voice heard, but not the best place for solving complex issues. If someone reaches out to us with a customer service issue on Twitter, we usually take the conversation to a channel where we can really get the full story (such as an email or phone call)."
And, in some cases, travelers are getting a dose of their own medicine. Last month, an Annapolis, Md. woman blogged and tweeted about being separated from her child while undergoing a search at a Transportation Security Administration checkpoint in Atlanta. Early the following morning, the TSA tweeted the news that it had posted a video of the incident on its own blog that, the TSA said, "clearly shows (the) individual was never separated from her baby."
For now, says Susan Black of travel consulting firm The Black & Wright Group, all tweets and Facebook status updates are not created equal: "Size really does matter, and someone with a few followers on Twitter won't bubble up to the top. For every botched honeymoon that gets resolved, there are thousands of tweeted or posted complaints that are ignored."
But, she adds, "the tide is changing" — not only because social-media participation continues to grow, but because search engines Google and Bing now index tweets and status updates on the first page of their search results.
If a travel company "ignores something and it goes viral," Black says, "they're doomed."
Some strategies for making your voice heard through social media:
•Build your base. Once you've joined Twitter and Facebook, "friend" and follow everyone in your address book who also belong to these sites, "and then start talking," suggests consumer columnist Christopher Elliott of Elliott.org. "Remember, it's a numbers game. A travel company is likelier to pay attention to someone with 10,000 followers than a lone wolf with just a handful of contacts." Looking for like-minded travel twitterers? Try Wanderlisting.com, which sorts accounts into such categories as airlines, deals and families.
•Reachout to travel companies that are active in social media and actively respond to customer problems. "This is a very new area," says travel consultant Susan Black, with most suppliers still geared to promoting deals rather than addressing real-time concerns. Among the exceptions, says Black: JetBlue, Southwest, and Virgin America airlines, and smaller hotels.
•Pick your battles, but don't give up. While many issues can be resolved by phone or e-mail, the immediacy of social media can be a major plus. And, writes Ed Hewitt of IndependentTraveler.com, while "it still helps if you have a fair number of readers on your blog, Twitter feed or YouTube channel, with an increasing number of service providers monitoring these outlets in real time, you can get heard not only by the right person, but in time for them to do something about it."
Follow reporter Laura Bly at twitter.com/laurably and twitter.com/usatodaytravel.
