View Larger ImagePortland Twisitor Center 
If you travel you probably have been to a visitor center to get information on where to go, where to stay, where to eat or what to do. If you are on your way to or on the ground in Portland (Oregon) you no longer have to go to a physical location to get that kind of information. All you need is access to micro-blogging site Twitter.
In February 2009 Travel Portland opened the world’s first “Twisitor Center” – a resource to get travel advice and recommendations not only from staff but also from other travelers and locals. Just ask a travel related question on Twitter and add the hashmark “inpdx” to your tweet. Passionate locals as well as other travelers and Travel Portland staff will answer your questions in real time.
The Twisitor Center supports a core element of Travel Portland’s marketing strategy: offering visitors tools to share their unfiltered Portland experiences through stories, photos, reviews and recommendations. Visitors who use the Twisitor Center not only have a much better travel experience – they usually also go on to share their Portland experience with their followers through Twitter and thus become authentic ambassadors for the destination.
The Twisitor Center concept is as simple as it is effective. By all accounts it has proven to be a huge success. Within a couple of weeks hundreds of visitors had used the service and gotten thousands of answers ranging from where to go for a vegan brunch to where to rent a horse.
Thousands of tweets and twitpics have been shared in real time by visitors with their followers outside of Portland on what they did, where they ate and what they saw while in Portland.
And the Twistor Center idea has created worldwide attention for Portland as media around the world wrote about this unique concept. Overall more than 200 articles from the NY Times to leading newspapers in Europe were written creating a media value of over 1 million USD for Travel Portland and Portland as a destination.
February 2009 to present
