Mark Evans of ME Consulting (and Mesh Conference fame) writes about social media and the travel sector:

[...] One thing that struck me during their presentations is how travel is such a personal experience, and how the best travel experiences don’t come from guidebooks but, instead, the people you meet along the way that suggest places you’d never otherwise have discovered.

This makes recommendation services such as Twitter a natural way for people to get travel advice from an extensive network of people who have real insight into what to see, do and hear, and a willingness to share it.

The question is how online travel services can effectively integrate Twitter into their offerings as opposed to having it exist as a standalone. Traveller, for example, has a way to ask questions that can be published on Twitter but there’s current no way to integrate the replies from Twitter users into Travellr’s database so Traveller users can benefit from what people are saying on Twitter.

My sense is the tighter integration of Twitter into online services will be a powerful and effective way to enhance the information available while extending the overall community. In some respects, Facebook is working on it with Facebook Connect but the reality is we’re just scratching the surface.

To comment on a personal note, when I was on vacation earlier this year in Florida I was happy to discover that some friends from Toronto were also down there via Facebook.

To reiterate and expand on one of Evans’ points, I believe the integration question is broader and potentially very technological difficult. It’s fine to get social recommendations, but how do we “keep” that recommendation in a useful form. That I have a Twitter recommendation to go to (say) the Distillery District while in Toronto needs to easily be integrated into whatever tool – e.g. Travellr – I’m using online, but then also be seamlessly transferable to whatever other travel services I’m using: TripIt, Google City Tours, and of course, whatever it is I’m using on my handheld. And of course, in a few short years the handheld is where all the action is going to be once in-destination.

Given the difficultly we see today in pleasantly presenting options to add calendar items, add business cards, subscribe to syndication feeds, and so forth – I suspect a more general solution will need to be found.