• by Harvey Chipkin , Columnist, December 20, 2010

One week, you're three young women in Ohio, tweeting about travel. The next you're tweeting from a luxury resort in Mexico, all expenses paid.

Here's how it happened. Every week, these women, who go under the name "The GoGirls" at a website called ZipSetGo.com, host Travelers Night Inn (hashtag #TNI), an organized travel discussion via Twitter. It runs from 3:30 pm to 5 pm ET every Thursday; a community of three or four hundred participates -- producing roughly 4,000 tweets per session.

Themes vary, with the hosts tweeting a new question every 10 minutes. Past themes have included culinary travel and holiday travel.

Noticing the activity around Travelers Night Inn, KWE Partners, a PR and marketing firm in Miami, brought the GoGirls to Grand Velas Riviera Nayarit, a high-end, all-inclusive resort on Mexico's Pacific Coast.

The GoGirls (a/k/a April Mescher, Andrea O'Carroll and Rachel Wolery), toured the destination, interviewed resort and destination executives -- and conducted their Thursday Tweetup from the resort as the TNI community offered their experiences, ideas and travel strategies.

The resort was the first to host Travelers Night In -- a pretty expensive proposition. But the KWE folks think that the virtual session will produce a physical meet-up at the resort -- as well as other ancillary business. Travelers Night In skews young but the resort's marketers believe there's enough potential in honeymoon, girls getaways and other Gen Y excursions to make the press trip a worthwhile investment.

The Tweetup was announced on ZipSetGo.com three weeks prior to the actual event -- with the theme "Mexico's Pacific Coast" (the local tourists also contributed to the trip.) Special "Girls Getaway" packages were created for #TNI attendees and promoted in social media.

ZipSetGo and its Tweetup claim to be impartial travel arbiters. While they clearly enjoyed the trip at the expense of the resort and destination, a KWE executive asserted, "The main thing is being transparent."

In addition to the GoGirls, there was press in attendance from National Geographic Traveler and Travel Girl Magazine. The event also received unsolicited promotion from a number of travel bloggers.

Based on the findings of a third-party data supplier, TNI saw a total of 3,361 tweets during the 90-minute session, representing 405 unique users; those Tweets corresponded to almost a million unique impressions.

As follow-up, promotions were posted for two weeks; also, the GoGirls posted blogs, photo essays and video interviews from the hotel and the destination on Facebook, Twitter and ZipSetGo.com.

Bottom Line: At a time when travel marketers and legacy media are debating the merits of bloggers as legitimate travel media, here's a leap to recognizing Twitterers -- and spending serious money on giving them a forum. KWE executives do say that their pre-invitation research revealed that TNI enjoys intense loyalty from a valuable demographic base.

If treating tweeters like full-fledged travel journalists seems like a stretch, consider that the sitcom "Stuff My Dad Says" is a full-fledged network television show based on a Twitter feed.