304 days

Athima Chansanchai

Social media connects travelers more than ever

In our share-happy world, one of the things define vicarious living is reading updates and gawking at photos from your friends' family's travels, and now you can see how prevalent those practices are.

Social travel start-up Tripl has created a sprawling, scroll-down-for-eternity graphic that crunches information from 18 sites, including Facebook, social media statistics hub Socialbakers, LinkedIn and TripAdvisor.

(Hat tip goes to The Next Web for spotting the infographic. Tripl is scheduled to go live next month.)

It shows that not only do reviews and pictures matter for people to make choices about where they go and stay, but that companies that focus on travel — airlines, hotels, and cruise ships, for example — also realize the power of social media to sway consumer tastes, especially students, as you can see from this part of the infographic:

Some big numbers that jump out:

• 50 million social reviews have been written for 495,000 rated hotels
• 72 percent of all social network users access their social networking sites daily while they're traveling
• 69 percent of all travel companies saw traffic growth from Facebook
• Southwest Airlines rules social media, with 1.6 million Facebook Likes and 1.1 million Twitter followers. 

Check out the rest on the infographic.

One thing: we don't advise you advertise to everyone where and when you'll be on vacation (watch which circle that info goes out to on Google+!), because of trolling thieves and of the potential for your insurance to go up when you do.

More stories:

• Friend your way to better travel
• BlackBerry Travel app packs it all in one suitcase
• Are travelers overloaded by social media?
• How social media is changing travel

Check out Technolog on Facebook, and on Twitter, follow Athima Chansanchai, who is also trying to keep her head above water in the Google+ stream.