Welcome to Facebook — population 500 million. That’s about as many users as there are females in India.
So it’s not surprising that companies would get around to exploiting the house that Mark Zuckerberg built sooner or later. That goes triple for travel-related industries, whose clientele tend to be extremely active on social networks.
Portland-based Second Porch — an online vacation rental site that lists 4,000 properties in more than 100 countries — existed wholly as a Facebook app until it launched its own base of operations, secondporch.com, in June. Browse its listings, and you’re able to navigate between Facebook profiles of owners and past renters, or see which properties your current Facebook friends recommend. And likewise, if you make an inquiry, owners are able to sniff around your profile.
“We view transparency as critical to overcoming one of the vacation rental industry’s issues: the fear of renting from an unknown person. So requiring a Facebook account largely overcomes that,” says president Brent Hieggelke.
It’s not just the start-ups, either. In mid-June, review giant TripAdvisor.com launched Trip Friends, a feature on its Web site that allows its thirty-some million monthly visitors to see which of their Facebook friends have visited a certain city, hotel, attraction, restaurant, what have you. That data is quarried from TripAdvisor’s popular Facebook app, Cities I’ve Visited, where users stick pins into places they’ve been on a world map and sound off about it.
Lest you think you can outsmart that CIV app with some obscure locale, it claims to highlight more than a billion user submissions (and counting).
Meanwhile, after being somewhat sucker punched by third party innovations in recent years, airlines won’t be late to the Facebook party. Just last Thursday, Delta launched a “ticket window”, the first of its kind on any social network, allowing users to book directly through the airline’s Facebook page, as opposed to being redirected to delta.com.
Just click on the “Book a Trip” tab and go — share your itinerary with your network, if you so desire.
British budget flier easyJet was supposed to be the first to offer bookings directly through Facebook, according to reports earlier in the year. Delta just beat them to the punch.
Expect every airline to soon follow suit.