"Twitter as a new weapon for travellers" is described in this article by PCMag, which highlights the continuous negative tweets of the micro-blogging-community. Of course, at first travellers could try to get their story published in a paper of magazine, later publish it on forums or their own blogs. What is new with Twitter is the sheer speed of distribution. People are re-tweet-ing other's people sorrow while being stranded in a flight or airport.

 

The question is how much can be done by airlines. You could virtually be spending millions on countering negative tweets, and that won't stop the battering. My guess is that people will get used to, and see through the messages appearing on Twitter, just like we are used to e-mail spam now. The challenge for the airlines and airports is how to join in the game. Why not publish delays, events, etc on Twitter before some users are setting the tone differently? Why not show a dynamic overview of positive and negative tweets on your website (using automatic emotion tracking software of course).

 

Whether the twitter-hype is here to stay (I am not sure about that yet, given the number of one-time-twitterers) or not, it may be very beneficial to work on the companies' transparency. Customers are shouting back these days.