Sept. 11th, airline strikes, airline bankruptcies — we’ve seen a lot of emergencies in the airline industry over the past four years. And every time something major happens we read reports how airlines leave their passengers stranded for hours, even days, while they sort things out. Typically, it is travel agencies who come to the rescue. In our case, our clients come first of course, but once they have been helped we have looked after many others who booked online. The dirty little secret in the airline business is that airlines do not have an infrastructure to handle emergencies.
The latest episode that has effected our office was the string of hurricanes and storms hitting the Caribbean, eastern Mexico, and south-eastern U.S this fall. Just to give you an idea of how travel agents shine in these circumstances, here is the experience of our vacation dept. manager, Lindy Rothenburger:
“Hurricane Wilma in Cancun caused the cancellation of my wedding group scheduled to depart on November 6th. I immediately went to work with our group coordinator at Transat Holidays to rebook the group to Punta Cana instead of Cancun. The new arrangements seemed to be confirmed, so I started on the mountain of paper work involved in sorting out all of the changes. Besides issuing new documents, credit notes, and new invoices, all of the insurance policies had to be adjusted.
Just as I was beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel, the tour operator called me with the bombshell. The new space they had confirmed the previous day turned out not to be quite as ‘confirmed’ as we thought! In fact, the charter flight was over-sold, and my group was out of luck. Taking a deep breath, I started scrambling. After a lot of searching and pleading, another tour operator offered us some seats. By putting pressure on the original tour operator that had let me down, I came up with the remaining 9 seats and the hotel arrangements I needed. I also persuaded them to honour their original promise of the free airline ticket and hotel accommodation that my group had earned from the original plans even though they no longer had the bulk of the group. By the Sunday before my wedding group was departing, I had all the pieces back together and spent most of my “day off” in the office putting documents and itineraries together for all of the passengers.
Unfortunately, my troubles were not quite over. The various tour operators I had cobbled together now required that my passengers pick up their airline tickets, transfer coupons, and hotel vouchers at three different counters at the airport! I just couldn’t see asking my clients to do this. By now, even I was getting confused by the complexity of the arrangements. I managed to convince all of the tour operators involved to courier everything to me so that I could sort the documents and put them together for each traveller. Then I went to the airport at 4:00am to personally give my clients their travel documents before checking in at their respective airline counters.”
Here are a couple of the comments Lindy received from her grateful clients:
“I was very impressed with the way you handled the arrangements, specifically all the changes from Mexico to the Dominican. The fact that you showed up at the airport so early in the morning blew me away. You have convinced me to seek your services the next time me and my girlfriend are travelling. ...Gary’’
“‘You did an absolutely amazing job of making things work for our wedding group. Your ears should have been burning as we all showered you with praise for this feat. …Joanie.’’
Regardless of the trouble and effort it takes to sort out these disasters, it is all worth it when you can look back with pride at your accomplishment. Appreciation from grateful clients is icing on the cake.
Way to go, Lindy!
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