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-surfaced—19 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!