One of the most notable tenets of the Twitter boom has been the spree of Twitter-supporting applications launched to work with the networking site.  Want to have your Twitter feed automatically update?  Easy – use Twitscoop or iGoogle.  Need to know when your client’s mentioned on Twitter?  Tweet Beep ought to help.  And so on, and on, and on.  A quick scroll down Squidoo’s list of Twitter ‘apps’ reveals quite how many of these programmes exist.  I tend to think of them as flies on a cow; in a sense they’re opportunistic and a little detestable, yet they’re also sensible and useful.

The good news is that these apps are getting increasingly innovative, and valuable.  Step forward Twihotels: a travel-related app that launched to some fanfare this week.  What does it do?  In its makers’ words:

“Twihotels.com helps you to tweet your hotel requirements on Twitter.com. It will help you to connect with users who would give you expert advice on the best form of accommodation. Quite likely, you could be directly approached by hotels, apartments & lodges, which means more options for you to choose from.   Your followers on Twitter will also help you out wherever they can.”

So basically, using Twihotels – you can log into your own Twitter account on its page – you Tweet your hotel requirements, and then sit back and hope someone can help you.  Your request appears in your own Twitter feed, as a tweet, in case one of your followers can help (unlikely), and also on the Twihotels feed, where hoteliers, hotel chains and booking agencies will be reading, in the hope that one/some of them can help (very likely).

Does it work?
Twihotels is reliant on a few things.  Firstly and chiefly, that a real range (geographically and financially) of hotels etc. are signed up to, and attentively following, its feed.  After all, it’s no good if, for example, you ask for suggestions for a hotel in Ottawa if none of Twihotel’s hotels etc. serve Ottawa.  No hotel website is going to be able to satisfy every single diverse query from Aachen to Zuzan, but the best can claim to be reasonally comprehensive.  Twihotels needs to be able to claim the same in order to be a worthy stop for the hotel-seeking web surfer.

To test out Twihotels’ efficiency, I make this pretty average request:

Within 24 hours I have four responses, written not as direct messages but on feeds with my username @dickmellor tagged.  The first (chronologically) is simply a re-tweet by @BountyTours, which I find out is the feed for a “travel agency in and for Morocco”. Through them I can apparently book 250+ Moroccan hotels online.  That’s good – my request is going to a wider, yet more tailored audience.  Kudos to Twihotels that Bounty Tours is among its followers. 

The next response is more spammy – it’s from Bounty Tours’ Operations feed, and they say: “we invite u to register on our web site so u can check rates, hotels… www.bounty-tours.com”.  However, there is a certain degree of sense to this suggestion, and they also end with a question: “you are looking for which category?”.  That shows that this is a personal reply – always a positive for the consumer – and also raises another point, about Twihotels’ search parameters.  They’re fine other than the category parameter, which is, well, a bit rubbish. You can opt for five-star, four-star and three-star, or the despairingly vague ‘Discount’ or ‘Budget’.  What does ‘Discount’ mean – a saving, or just mid-range prices?  As for ‘Budget’, that’s surely a bit qualitative: one man’s bargain is another man’s rip-off.  I think it would be better here to have the star-ratings as a separate, optional parameter, and then have a box where you select a price range, with the option of USD, GBP, EUR or the chosen destination’s currency.  I don’t blame Bounty Tours at all for asking for clarification from me.

Nor indeed do I chide the fruity-sounding Riad Orangeraie, who write: “Hi, when you say ‘Budget’ – what does that look like in £, $ or €?”.  Sensible price query aside, Riad Orangeraie’s reply is exactly what I hoped for as a Twihotels trialist.  Were I genuinely interested in Marrakech accommodation, I’d reply with my criteria and almost certainly end up with enough details to decide whether I wanted to stay at the riad.

The final response again carries a whiff of spam, but turns out to be valuable. It’s from @bnblovers, which I find out is the Twitter account of BedandBreakfast.com, an online agency and search facilities for worldwide B&Bs.  They advise me: “Save $50 on your online reservation when you book here: http://ow.ly/jhTE”.  The link, as the subsequent sentence (“five great bed and breakfast options for Marrakech”) suggests, takes me to BedandBreakfast.com, but to a results page on there for a Marrakech search.  Not only that, but a search on the dates I requested, and with my other criteria satisfied.  Someone somewhere has gone to appreciable lengths to start my search for me, and again as a consumer I value the effort on my behalf.  It makes me feel wanted, and that in turn would incline me to trust this company and book with them.

Furthermore, according to Twihotels, some hoteliers may also be inclined to offer discounts and bargains as a result of finding them on Twitter.  This tallies with a recent story that Pueblo Bonito Oceanfront Resorts and Spas is offering exclusive reductions to its Twitter and Facebook followers.

But what about personal recommendations?
All of my responses indicate sensible businesses using Twihotels in a diligent manner, and all show them serving my purpose impressively.  But what of the suggestion that Twihotels also serves to bring the enquirer personal recommendations, tips, that sort of thing?

As Ron Callari outlines on InventorSpot, this is Twihotels’ co-aim: “Hotel booking sites like Hotels.com can locate a number of hotels any where in the world and if you are diligent enough to cross-reference with TripAdvisor you can most likely obtain a review on that hotel’s performance. But until now, there was no one site that could surface hotel recommendations for you firsthand, without a lot of searching and cross-referencing. Twihotels is filling that void nicely.”

Hmm.  In my (admittedly not exhaustive) experience, it doesn’t plug the void.  None of my followers came back with any suggestions, only businesses.  Why not?  It’s impossible to say with certainty, but having quizzed a few of them, those who saw my request simply couldn’t help.  Their knowledge of budget hotels in Marrakech was non-existent.  And that’s fair enough – this is a specialist subject, one which relies on a niche bank of knowledge or the slim chance of personal experience.  On top of which, there are additional hurdles: any follower who actually could help me would have needed to be checking their feed at the right time in order to see my request; what’s more the Twihotels tweet, when it appears, does look a bit.. spammy.  To be honest, if someone I followed tweeted a message like mine, I’d be pretty likely to dismiss it as junk.  It just has that feel.

In terms of getting pointers from your followers, you can obviously improve your own odds.  The more followers you have, the better chance of there being one who could help – that equation seems to make sense.  Better yet, were I to have a bank of travel-hardened, Twitter-attentive followers who shared an interest in Morocco, I’d have been laughing. 

But for an ordinary Joe like me, with ordinary Joe followers, there seem pretty long odds on getting a decent, neutral recommendation.   And without that, Twihotels risks simply becoming a Twitter variation on the likes of Hotels.com, one still needing cross-reference with  TripAdvisor-type sites for those crucial ordinary Joe recommendations.  Although Twihotels does seem to have in its favour the charmingly personalised responses from businesses that an enquirer can expect.   That’s an attraction in itself, but is it enough to persuade hotel-seekers to turn to Twihotels?