Tweet your way to an easy Thanksgiving travel experience

COLORADO HOLIDAY GUIDE
TRAVEL TIPS FOR DIA
DENVER - One national travel company is taking social networking to a new level by providing Thanksgiving travelers with real-time updates from airports across the country.

Travelocity is leading the way in transportation communication by combining strategically placed airport spotters with social networking tools like Twitter and blogs. The end results: live travel trends from your arrival or destination airport.

The Thanksgiving Task Force with the popular travel site has set up shop at the nation's 12 largest airports: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix, San Francisco, Tampa and Washington D.C.

From there, airport spotters are blogging and tweeting about conditions and hotspots around the airport like security wait times, check in times, traffic and anywhere travelers might run into a delay at the airport.

"Right now I would say people are steadily streaming in but things are moving really well," Travelocity spotter Rachel Berg said of Denver International Airport at 6:30 a.m. "I'm not seeing long lines anywhere; I've checked all the different ticket counters for the airlines. I'd say it's about a five minute wait for most of them . . . Things are, right now, running really smoothly."

Berg and her fellow spotters are posting their updates to their blog, windowseatblog.com/tff, and on individual Twitter pages: Denver's Twitter handle, flyfromdenver.

"We're using Twitter to micro blog throughout the day so I'm here checking on the airport conditions and when I see something here worth noting I'll tweet about it on Twitter," she explained. "It also gets put on the Window Seat blog."

If flying out of DIA is on your holiday agenda, you can also check the status of your arrival airport (so long as it is in the top 12) to find updates before you arrive.

"We have 12 monitors at different airports so all of those airports are collected in one place on the blog so you can check and see what's going on there," Berg said.

The Thanksgiving Task Force is also looking for help from the public in staying on top the travel trends.

"We also invite the public to Tweet about what they're seeing at airports as well. So you have a section for travelers, just anyone who comes to the airport, if you want to send a tweet in you can put that up and we'll put it on our blog. The instructions are on the blog," she said.

Check out the task force's blog at www.windowseatblog.com/tff or look to www.twitter.com/flyfromdenver for Denver-specific updates.