United Offers Special Sales Via Twitter

There's a 95 percent chance Senior Editor Christine Sarkis is thinking about travel right now. Follow her on Instagram @postcartography and Twitter @ChristineSarkis.

Christine Sarkis is an SATW-award-winning journalist and executive editor at SmarterTravel. Her stories have also appeared on USA Today, Conde Nast Traveler, Huffington Post, and Business Insider. Her advice has been featured in dozens of print and online publications including The New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, and People magazine. She has also shared travel tips on television and radio shows including Good Morning America, Marketplace, and Here & Now. Her work has been published in the anthologies Spain from a Backpack and The Best Women's Travel Writing 2008. She is currently working on a travel memoir.

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It’s a silly name, sure, but will United’s new Twitter-only, limited-time specials—or “twares”— yield savings?

Whether United has hit upon a way for companies to actually have a useful presence on sites like Twitter is a point that will likely be debated. But as someone who prefers newsy or factual tweets over the what-I’m-doing-at-this-exact-second (eating a sandwich, standing in line) variety, I have to admit I’m intrigued. The first “tware” sale fare of $63 one-way between Chicago and Washington, D.C., just expired, but offered decent savings over the regular fare of $80 I found directly through the United site. It’s hard to say if savings like that will be the exception or the rule, but it’s an auspicious start.

One issue I noticed: United’s announcement page doesn’t have a link to the airline’s Twitter page. So for people for who aren’t familiar with Twitter but want the sale scoop, there’s no easy way to bridge the gap between a legacy line carrier and this new social media experiment.

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