Diane Clarkson from Jupiter Research, is one of several commentators who have remarked on the future importance of RSS to the travel business.
Yesterday she revealed Travelocity has launched a customized RSS feed to tell you when they’ve found lower fares on your subscribed routes. She says:
These highly targeted messages are a great example of how RSS can be leveraged in an experiment that could create customer loyalty and drive incremental sales.
And while the word “leverage” still makes me want to vomit, I can only agree with her.
Lest anybody is reluctant to set up an RSS feeder just to track their Travelocity bargains, guess what, Yahoo! is about to wrap it up into their email service.
Update: But wait - it gets better. As my own Yahoo! mail account is still of the regular non-beta flavour, I didn’t realise (until I read Russell Beattie’s notebook this morning) they have added SMS alerts to these email-bound RSS feeds.
Short of hiring Tinkerbell to sit on your customer’s shoulder and whisper, it’s hard to imagine a more compelling channel for one-to-one permission-based communications.
Mike Manuel is another PR blogger whose head is spinning with the possibilities this presents.
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