Clients will always bring a smile to your face | Travel Research Online

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Clients will always bring a smile to your face

February can be a stressful month for many. We have Valentines Day (and if anyone has any suggestions, I am all ears), we are in the midst of Wave Season, toss in a little Zika Virus and… well, you get the picture. So, I wanted to take a little time to maybe elicit a smile.

Recently an old article from the Tropical Nomad re-surfaced19 Actual Complaints Received By Thomas Cook. I do suggest you give it a read and have a chuckle. While I am not sure that all of them are legitimate, you know that some of them are. Do you have some funny client tales?

My office is on the East Coast and one time a client was flying to Chicago. With a flight time of 1:24 and an hour time change, the client was very confused as to why they were flying and not driving.

Like the Tropical Nomad list, I too had a couple very irritated that no one spoke English at the Mexican resort we arranged for them.

There is always the difficulty in explaining the difference between non-stop and direct flights; and then the eternally confusing cruise and hotel phrases…. adjoining, adjacent, and connecting.

A client of mine was in the midst of a fairly complex FIT when a flight was missed. She ended up working directly with the airlines resulting in some crazy routing and a horrible arrival. When we touched base, she said that she did not know we could handle something like that. Hello? We just arranged a multi-week complex itinerary. But in her defense, we might not have emphasized the breadth of our service.

Of course passports always present a problem as well. We have had clients who have been blissfully unaware of their legal names for decades. We have also had clients insisting that a soon-to-be-expired passport was fine because a friend told them so. Passports presented such a problem for us that for any international itinerary, we began requiring a photocopy of the first page just to make sure no one made any mistakes!

So, do you have any amusing client stories? Leave a comment but leave out the identifying details! Let’s all take a moment and laugh together!

 

 

 

 

  2 thoughts on “Clients will always bring a smile to your face

  1. Ann Petronio says:

    Had a client who was very upset because the hotel reservation noted “bedding not guaranteed”….and she was very annoyed that she might have to bring her own sheets/blankets! LOL

  2. I had a wedding group travel to the Caribbean. The father of the bride is a friend and he is a real card, loves to play tricks on people. So a few days after the group returned, one of the wedding guests emailed and requested half of her money back saying she was told that “if the weather wasn’t perfect for at least half of the number of days while on vacation”, she would receive half of her money back. I was quite confused with the email, so I called her to have a discussion. It turns out that the father of the bride had told her this and she totally believed him! She understood that the whole group was getting half of their money back! My friend had quite the laugh when I told him about this!

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