KLM does social media
If you’ve ever planned or been involved with the planning of a holiday with friends or family – you’ll know what a nightmare it can be. It can take hundreds of emails, phone calls and weeks before anything actually can be agreed or even booked...
But now you can do this all through Facebook (ever present in our lives – watch this space, CarJet will be joining Facebook soon too!) and it’s actually fairly easy!
Dutch airline, KLM, have introduced the KLM Trip Planner which aims to help its customers plan a holiday with friends and family… as long as they’re on Facebook, of course!
invite your friends!
The planner takes you through simple steps starting with creating the group you’re planning to travel with. Having connected with Facebook, you can select people from your friends list and then get going. The planner can even suggest destinations for you depending on what type of trip you want and who’s going. But if you already have somewhere in mind, you can just put that in. You can put in up to 5 destinations on the KLM (or partner airline) network including dates before sending these to your group. This will be sent to your friends via Facebook - either posted to their walls or with a private message. You even get to pick a ‘greeting’ type card to send the details!
Once sent, each member of the group is able to select their preferences and they’re given up to 7 days to pick (the greeting card they’re sent has a countdown timer too!). Now, you might still find that agreeing on a trip is a challenge - it always is when several people are involved! But the planner is great for giving everybody access to details of the possible trips on the same tool. Once you have come to an agreement, you can either book the whole group altogether using the Trip Planner or send the link with flight details to people so they can book it themselves.
I’ve only played around with it so far but I’m already wishing there was something like this that encompassed all airlines and travel options!
Amsterdam
As well as having frequent flights to the Dutch capital, Amsterdam, KLM fly to destinations throughout Europe and as far as Johannesburg and Dubai. If you love making things easy, CarJet has great deal car hire worldwide including Amsterdam car hire, Johannesburg car hire and Dubai car hire.
KLM are really getting into this whole social media lark – this being the second social media tool they have made available this year. Previously, they introduced “Meet & Seat” which allows people who’ve made flight bookings with them to link their reservation to their Facebook or LinkedIn profiles (importantly, you can choose how much information you want to show…), see who else has done this and basically use this to help you choose your seat. The tool will actually tell you someone using the service has opted to sit next to you as well as updated you on other travellers also using the service. It is, however, good to know that if you don’t want to be involved with this, you will still remain completely anonymous to those more into “social seating” idea. Check out this short video in a post by Wired on it – I just found it amusing!
Not so sure I’m as keen on this one as I am the Trip Planner, but it would certainly make for an interesting journey nonetheless!