Booking Flights on Facebook?
Delta is in the Social Media Game
You can now book a flight on Facebook on Delta Airlines Facebook page and tell your friends about it without ever leaving Facebook.
When you are on Delta Airlines Facebook page you click the “Book a Flight” Button, then click the get started button. Immediately Delta asks for permission to access your information on your Facebook page including your Friends, user ID, networks, gender, and profile picture. If you don’t allow it the process stops as far as I can tell.
I guess the assumption is that you must give up your data if you want to play the booking game through Facebook. So to figure this out, I let them have my information.
From there it is a fairly easy process and not much different than booking on their main site. You have the option to share the flight with your friends. I have not booked a flight on Facebook to see what happens next. If anyone reading this has used this application I would like to hear your thoughts.
I can see this being used for personal travel but not so much for business. I am not totally sure what the real value proposition to booking through Facebook is at this point, with the exception of the ‘Sharing” of my flight information, and maybe for the Faceobook junkies who cant leave the site it does something?
I wonder what Delta does with my information they now have access to? Will they use it to help me solve travel problems or use it to target me for advertising messages?
Delta at the time of this posting has about 38,500 Fans on their page. Lots of comments: some positive and and a lot of negative about service issues.
It is hard to tell if Delta uses Facebook to actually communicate to the market.
Delta has also gotten more active in the use of Twitter and now has a staff to respond to Tweets. When I go to their Twitter acccount they have 78.000 followers, they follow 730 people and it looks like they don’t respond daily as there are lapses in their tweets on their corporate account. They do have a Twitter account “deltaassist‘ that focuses on resolving customer issues. This account has 2300 followers.
The airlines are waking up to the use Social Media tools. What will be interesting to watch is how they use the technology. Will they enhance the customer experience, listen and react to the market of travelers needs, or will it just be another way to get more money from the traveler with no value added?
Could Business Aviation and the Air Charter Industry use these same tools to reach the market in a postive and social way?
An Article titled Six Ways the Travel Industry can use Social Media is a good read if you have the time.
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