New Tool Lets Hotels Find Guests Automatically By Mining Twitter

Hotels are having a hard time at the moment as the recession bites and less people travel but a new tool helps them to find guests via Twitter. Reach.ly allows you to connect your Twitter account with the service, add the cities you want to monitor and then spits back all the people who are talking about visiting those cities on Twitter. This is nothing new as you could easily do this manually for the last few years but the art of automating it for the hotel industry certainly is new.

Reliable Results

Unlike many Twitter search tools or indeed the main Twitter search itself which are full of inaccurate results and spam the results that this tool throws back are actually very accurate. The service says that it offers semantic technology to tailor the results and you can look back over previous days to see what people have been saying. The service seems to be free for the moment and doesn’t even have a premium version but you can see plenty of potential for revenue here if it does take off.

Verdict

It’s a very good idea and even though you could do this yourself on Twitter it is surprising just how good the results are and how well they are presented. The big problem they have is that this is not going to scale. I did a search for Dublin and although the results were excellent there were only about 20 per day at best. That would work great if just one hotel was using the service but if this does take off in any way and 100s of hotels start using it then users well basically be getting bombarded with spam offers at the slightest mention of a city. I’d actually prefer to see them charging for this service from day one to keep it exclusive. It is interesting though just how many good strong sales leads the technology is providing and I can already think of lots of other verticals that this could be spread across. People spend a lot of their time on Twitter looking for goods and services so it is only natural that companies would emerge to try and match them up with the businesses offering them.