Week3o: Social media and Travelling

Hello, everybody! I would like to start this by two simple questions for you guys. How do you prepare vacation trips (exclude business trips) in the recent 3 years? And can you prepare your trip without internet in recent a few year? I bet the answer is no.

The first step of preparing a trip is to decide transportation and hotel. There are so many flight tickets and hotel booking website giving out all kinds of deals to the customers. When they sell cheap tickets, rental cars and hotels, they are expanding their markets. The examples are Hotwire.com, Priceline.com, Groupon, Gilt, Cheapticket.com, and Bookit.com. Those are websites selling hotel deals, flight deals and car rental deals or maybe the whole packages. It is maybe the first time for some people to buy deals online. So before they do it, they might go to some bloggers’ websites to check out which website has the best deals and the best reputations. Social media is playing an important role in the step.

After you take care of your hotels and tickets, you will start to think what you should do in the new place you know nothing about. I am going to tell you how to use social media to travel according to my own experience. I went to Miami with my two other friends half a month ago. Miami could be considered as a whole new country for us because we had never been there before. However, we had the most amazing four days there. Thanks to the social media. We did our homework before we went there. We checked out all kinds of blogs and sources online and made a plan. We looked for some places those are the most recommended going. There are Miami downtown, Miami Beach, Key West, and Everglades National Park. There are some famous restaurants as well.

People who have been to Miami wrote about their trips on their blogs, and somehow they followed other people’s steps because they did research too. Social media affects the audiences in an extremely fast speed. It is unlike books, newspapers or magazines. It allows more people to get access because it is free to everybody. We can imagine that if one person wrote a blog about a place he went, and ten people read it and shared it. A hundred people will see those ten people shared the blog and goes on and on. That is how social media works in any field. The more people read about you, the bigger your market can get. Travelling cannot be accomplished without internet or social media. People need information from social media, and merchants can use social media to expand their market as well.