Airline/Hotel Twitter Customer Service Is About To Get Easier

Given that this is talking about making changes to another person's reservation, it just raised an interesting question for me - how do you make all these award bookings/changes over the phone when you're not the account holder? Do you just pretend to be them or is there some authorisation system you use?

@takke They probably either conference the 3rd party in or give them the info and let them book it themselves

For those of us who remember the olden days (circa 2006--2007), recall that Twitter was originally designed for distribution of SMS messages, hence the 140 character limit (the SMS protocol specifies 160). And Twitter is still accessible via SMS, though most people access it through other means. Nowadays it is of course possible to send longer messages via SMS, though what happens under the hood is that the sending phone breaks up a long message into 160-character chunks, sends each one as a separate message, and the receiving phone (if it's smart enough) glues the pieces back together. It's nice to see Twitter finally catch up with what phone manufacturers have been doing for years.

@ takke @ Lisa -- In this case I was the 3rd party: https://onemileatatime.com/anatomy-of-a-delay-how-to-react-to-travel-disruptions/

But for others, Lisa's right, and it's thankfully easy to have a three-way call nowadays.

@ takke -- For many airlines, that rule is limited to Twitter, given the limited amount of information you can share there. Over the phone they'll usually let you make bookings/changes for others, assuming you have all their account info.

@lucky - thanks, good to know. I did do that recently actually where I needed to change the baggage allowance on a booking but I wasn't sure if it would work with a more major change.

I've used Twitter and Facebook to message mainstream travel brands a lot, it turned out to be very helpful.