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.

No excuse for poor customer service

Over the past month two issues have arisen from purchases my girlfriend made. They have been handled in two completely different ways, and should leave one brand completely embarassed of itself.

When we were in New York she bought a pair of Lucky Brand Jeans from their store. She had been looking for a specific pair for a while and fell in love with a pair she found at the Lucky store. This is not her or my first purchase of Lucky product, we purchase a large number of clothes from their stores. She had been trying on two different sizes in the store and when she made the purchase the girl helping her mistakenly put the wrong size in her bag. An honest mistake, but one the company clearly should have a process in place to rectify considering we live in Canada. An email was sent three weeks ago to their online customer service explaining the situation.....and we have not received even an automated reply from the company. Brutal. Disappointing. Unacceptable. We spend hundreds of dollars on every purchase we make from the company and they cannot even respond to a simple email.

In stark contrast to that my lovely lady also purchased a box of General Mills granola bars and upon opening one of them up found a bug inside. Not exactly tasty. She sent a note to the company and within 24 hours had an apology and word that they would send some coupons to her since her product was not up to snuff. She received those coupons within a week and it was essentially twelve dollars worth of free product, double or triple the value of the granola bars she had initially bought.

To this day she still hasn't heard from Lucky Brand.

In a world with the internet you should easily have the facilities in your company to deal with customer issues with your product. People that purchase your brand are already sold on your company and it is far easier to please them and keep them purchasing your products as opposed to finding new customers who know nothing about your brand. So why would you mess around with something as easy as responding to an email???? It boggles the mind. Lucky has stores all across North America and yet they don't have the capability to respond to an email. To me that reeks of a company I no longer want to deal with. Sorry Lucky, you've lost two customers and we will be telling friends of your deficiencies.

Nice clothes are only part of running a business.