I have read where many travelers get help from airlines and hotels by using Twitter to tweet messages to the airline or hotel asking for assistance. I just created a Twitter account but I'm having difficulty understanding how to respond when an airline or hotel asks me for more info. I see there is a "reply" button, but when I read others tweets the airline says to DM the details to them. I don't understand how I can DM them back (vs. just replying)- I see no button to do that. Can anyone give me some guidance?

Thanks.

Welcome to the Twitter-verse! It's not as scary of a place as it might first seem.

A DM is just a PM/private message. Drop by the profile of the user that you want to send a DM to and click on the little person icon to the left of the 'follow'/'following' button. You'll see the DM option in the drop-down.

For example, if you wanted to DM FlyerTalk... http://tinypic.com/r/b7bblj/5

You need to be following the account and the account needs to be following you in order to have a back-and-forth exchange through DMs.

You can check for any DMs sent to you by looking at your own Twitter profile. In the same place where there was that little person button on the other user's profile, you'll see an envelope icon on your profile. That's where your DMs will show up. They're all threaded so longer conversations shouldn't be hard to follow.

So am I to assume that if I send a tweet to, let's say, American Airlines (@americanair) that they will be following me if they expect me to DM them back?

Yes. If you Tweet @ an account with an issue, they'll likely start to follow you and take the conversation from public (Tweets) to private (DMs) so that more sensitive information can be exchanged.

The other thing that I've seen also happen (but less often) is that you'll get a response to your Tweet with either a:
1. link to an online complaint form
2. phone number you can call
3. email address where you can send a detailed explanation of your situation

I spend a good portion of my day on Twitter, so feel free to ask away

Thanks TP. I think I understand it. So if I tweet AA with a complaint/question will everyone be able to see it since at that point AA isn't following me ?

Maybe I'll just have to wait until I have someone to tweet until I can really see how this works.

OK. Lets see if I can not lose you here... If you Tweet at AmericanAir:

1. Anyone who visits your Twitter profile will be able to see the Tweet. For example, if you look at the FlyerTalk Twitter... https://twitter.com/FlyerTalk You can scroll down the profile page and see all of the people that they have Tweeted at and all of the other Tweets that they have posted.

2. Any of the people following you WILL NOT be able to see your Tweet at AmericanAir IF you start the Tweet with "@AmericanAir". For example, this Tweet won't show up in the feed that all of FlterTalk's 14k followers see... https://twitter.com/FlyerTalk/status/367346012320309248 Twitter treats Tweets that start with an ampersand as being public conversations between two people (or in this case 6 total accounts).

3. Any of the people following you WILL see your Tweet at AmericanAir IF you start your Tweet with anything other than an ampersand. For example, this Tweet showed up in the feeds of all of FlyerTalk's 14k followers... https://twitter.com/FlyerTalk/status/368115575194542080

4. Anyone who visits the AmericanAir profile will NOT be able to see your Tweet at AmericanAir if they do not respond to your Tweet publicly.

5. Anyone who visits the AmericanAir profile WILL be able to see your Tweet a AmericanAir if they do respond to your Tweet publicly. https://twitter.com/AmericanAir/with_replies

6. Anyone who searches Twitter for any of the keywords that you include in your Tweet to AmericanAir will be able to see your Tweet. For example, if you wanted to tell AmericanAir that they sucked, these people did it before you could... https://twitter.com/search?q=americanair%20sucks

*No one can access DMs except for the 2 accounts exchanging them and then of course anyone who has access to the log-ins for those accounts (ie: bigger airline/hotel accounts have multiple reps handling the Tweeting)

*You can always delete the Tweets that you send, but unless the other party also deletes their Tweets as well, half of the exchange will still remain on Twitter.

TL;DR: If you're hoping to avoid airing dirty laundry in public on Twitter, your best best to to send a short Tweet starting with an amersand+theaccountname at the account that you want to contact letting them know that you have an issue that you'd like to discuss and asking them to follow you back so that you can have a DM exchange.

Wow. Thanks so much for such detail. I don't anticipate contacting my favorite airline and hotel chains frequently, but others seem to get so much help that I want to understand how to contact them and get a quick response. I've printed out all your responses to me. Thanks again.

Happy to help. I've seen many, many people find help online from the Twitter accounts of airlines, hotels, and credit card companies. Hopefully, you won't soon (if ever) run into a situation where you'll need to reach out.

This isn't a terrible resource if you want to do some reading at some point https://support.twitter.com/groups/5...ome-to-twitter

As Twitter isn't a travel tool we've moved the thread to Travel Technology Forum for better exposure and participation. One month trailing link.

JDiver
senior moderator

I think you've gotten your terminology confused.

An ampersand looks like & and represents the word and
An at-sign looks like @ and represents the word at

Each ampersand reference in TravelingPeanut's post should actually be an at-sign reference.

I never knew this!

Because it's not true. I see plenty of tweets in my feed that start with @whomever and I'm not that person.

Plus certain accounts can be DMd without following.. They have to opt-in for this feature. Since you follow them they can DM you back.
http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/0...fied-accounts/