Why travel agents will be no more

Earlier this year I wrote about how my girlfriend had a tough time dealing with Lucky Brand jeans customer service. Fortunately they reached out finally and went above and beyond to rectify the situation. Unfortunately I still hear some shocking stories of customer service from friends, it just can't happen in this day and age. The individual has too much power to hurt your brand.

Recently two close friends of mine were married and wanted to go to Fiji on their honeymoon. They also had their wedding registry with Flight Centre to help pay for their trip. Since this was such a major trip for the two of them, they decided to use an expert to plan and book it. Unfortunately this so called travel expert didn't do his research and relied on outsourcing the accommodations to a Fijian travel firm. This resulted in my friends being placed in a worn down, family hotel on the mainland of Fiji where beaches aren't nearly as good as on the outlying islands. They arrived after traveling from Vancouver ready to relax and were instantly disappointed. They had been overpromised and under-delivered. Images they were sent were those of the hotel's sister property which was much nicer, but was double the price they were told. After two days they determined the hotel just wouldn't do and contacted their "professional" agent to help them switch locations. After he dilly-dallied for a day they went online and booked their own accommodation for the rest of the trip.

They arrived at their new accommodations to find it was cheaper than what their "professional" travel agent had booked them and much more to the specifications they had indicated to him, which he had failed to produce. It was off the mainland, featured pristine beaches, no screaming children, and a very nice private bungalow.

Now, I know there is no way a travel agent will know where to stay in every country in the world, it's impossible to ask that of them. What is possible, is for them to do a little bit of research on locations before recommending something to a new client. If an average joe can go on Trip Advisor and Expedia and read reviews why can't a person who's job it is to book travel for people? Such a simple thing could have avoided the enormous headache that is being created surrounding this entire catastrophe.

Now Flight Centre is holding up a refund for my friends by saying it depends on what the Fijian travel agency THEY outsourced to tell them they will give back. Well, unfortunately it's not my friends problem that YOU outsourced to Fiji. The only mistake my friends made was booking using a Flight Centre travel agent. Now that you have failed on booking travel AND customer service I'm sure they won't make that mistake again.

Oh and now they've told all their friends too, so..... you've got that going for you Flight Centre.

Awful Execution

Is there anything worse than a mass communication piece from a company you have a relationship with that forgets your name? As a marketer and someone with half a brain I realize that they don't send out individual emails, but I also understand that my cell phone company should have a system that allows them to put my first name into the email instead of....

They executed the "Dear" part well but that is about as good as they did on this piece in which they were asking their customers for help in making the company better. I have one suggestion for them, but I'm not sure if this email was meant for me because there isn't any name on it so I guess i'll have to save my thoughts.

When you are sending out a mass email or mass communication check your database, check your system, and for goodness sakes do a test run to make sure everything will go smooth. You are sending this out to YOUR clients, I wouldn't want to embarrass myself like this.