Travel companies that dismissed micro-blogging service Twitter (”Why do I want to know if someone is eating a bagel or not?”) may well be rethinking their strategy this morning.

In the past, results for a search for “Tnooz Hotel Paris” [it doesn't exist, obviously] would probably have returned the property’s website, a TripAdvisor review, a handful of aggregator sites, an OTA or two, and maybe a blog post or forum entry in the first few pages.

But now the results may include relevant tweets from Twitter. The relevancy may be determined by how many other Twitterists have re-tweeted the post, number of inbound links from respected and page ranked authorities, number of followers for the tweeter, etc.

In one quick stroke the search engines will be including the Zeitgeist of travel: the here and now of the travel conversation or what the web community is saying about destinations, airlines, hotels, tour operators, agencies and, most importantly, the reaction to it.

If this is the case, Twitter becomes a powerful channel for travel companies and can no longer be ignored.

Get the full story at tnooz.com