As Reach.ly puts it simply on its website: “Someone tweets about their trip to your city. We gather these tweets and present them to you. So you can interact directly with potential guests.”

The process is simple. Just type in the name of the city, Singapore for example, and a whole stream of tweets from people in the Lion city or planning to go there appears.

Reach.ly’s web-based service uses revolutionary complex semantic algorithms to analyse the Twitter stream and extract tweets by the Twitter users on their travel to Singapore, in this instance, or to any other cities in the near future.

Reach.ly CEO and co-founder, Ernests Stals, said hotels could then view these specific tweets in real time, be the very first to reach out to the consumers, engage them in a conversation and send offers directly to them.

Hotels can thus fill more rooms without paying booking fees to middlemen.

“Consumers are tremendously responsive to such direct outreach via Twitter. Our test results show that 9% of guests receiving a message actually make a booking! About 20% more respond that they appreciate the direct communication,” said Stals.

According to Google, the average online travel shopper visits 22 sites across nine or more sessions prior to making a reservation.

“But one good direct offer could secure the guest’s booking,” Stals added.

Hotels are just the first step for Reach.ly. The company plans future applications of its technology for a range of travel-related searches, including car rentals and airline tickets. 

The Reach.ly proprietary Twitter stream mining and semantic analysis algorithms are also suitable for other vertical markets, which are looking into direct marketing opportunities using social media.