Whether personal or job-related, corporate travel professionals are participating in more social networks than they did one year ago, and they are doing so at a higher rate, according to a Spring 2010 online survey conducted by AirPlus International. The recent exercise follows up on a year-ago survey also conducted by AirPlus, and included additional social networking platforms where respondents might be active users. Not only did the survey show fairly robust usage numbers for the new inclusions – Plaxo and TripIt – it also showed increased usage on for nearly every social platform making a repeat appearance in the survey this year.

While Linked In users held steady at about 58 percent, use of Facebook increased among surveyed travel management pros by almost 25 percent over last year’s numbers. Use of Twitter, which was employed by 15.5 percent of survey respondents last year, ostensibly doubled its numbers in the 2010 survey. Corporate travel industry blogs were another big performer in year-over-year comparisons, with 20 percent of respondents indicating they participated in this format in 2010 compared to less than 13 percent who did so in 2009, an increase of 50 percent.

Overall, a higher percentage of survey respondents cited use of social networking sites this year. Just under 72 percent of respondents indicated they were using social media cites either personally or professionally last year. That number increased to 77 percent in the 2010 survey.

Survey respondents indicated that traveler use of social media sites for travel-related recommendations and/or services has also been on the rise since last year. Forty percent said that their travelers had increased use of social networks for travel-related research, while less than 5 percent thought that it had decreased.

As a new generation of business traveler enters the workplace with plugged-in lives and consumer-style expectations for enterprise technologies, managed travel programs would do well to explore the options now.

Download the free PDF for full survey results.

AirPlus…The Wire June 2010 (PDF, 250 KB)

Additional Resources:

5Q With Travel Manager Michelle De Costa

10 Top Travel Management Tactics for 2010 (webinar)

Reinventing the Water Cooler: Buyers and TMCs Exploring Social Networking

Is Tech Driving the Traveler-Centric Future? Managers Fear Loss of Control