Bottom Line

It amazes me how often someone will take forever to book a reservation and then whine and complain when the price changes. A customer had spoken to an agent yesterday, waited to book and then was flabbergasted that price went up $600. No problem, he still wants the vacation. I'm going along booking the trip and he tells me that he has a promotion code for $300. Great!
I review the information, going over the flight times and numbers and verifying the hotel and room style. I verify the price. (again)
I get to the passenger information and I'm filling in his name etc when he says to me "Wait, are you booking the reservation? I have a promotion code."
I tell him I can add the promotion code after I fill in the information and try to proceed. He tells me "but I need you to tell me what the bottom line price is first, after the promotion code".
Can you NOT just deduct 300 from the "bottom line" price I gave you 3 times before???

Guaranteed Bookings

We have a guarantee with our bookings that basically says if you book with us and you encounter a problem with the hotel, we will make it right or move you to another hotel.
A customer today was all kinds of nasty because the hotel she booked was horrible and no one at the hotel could fix it. Apparently there was no maintenance on call or the hotel just did not want to bother with it. Either way, we moved her to another hotel.
She was still traveling and instead of being grateful that she was not forced to stay in a fleabag hotel she was complaining about how it was our fault the hotel was a mess.
Lady, we don't build the hotels. We have hundreds of thousands of hotels all over the world you can book from our website. Do you think we inspect every single room (and yours twice) before you check in? We honored our guarantee by making it right for you. For you to whine and threaten never to use our services again is just too funny.
Let me tell you a story...
Before I came to work for this company I found it necessary to get a hotel for a few days in the area I moved to. I wasn't familiar with the area so I looked in the phonebook, called a few hotels and got the cheapest one I could find. I got there fairly late so I asked the clerk if he would give me a price break. He was visibly annoyed. My punishment? I got a room you only see in nightmares.
The bedspread was rumpled, (although the sheets were at least still made up) there was mold in the corners of the bathroom. and a pubic hair in the sink. The floor had not been vacuumed in quite a while as you could see the white layer of dust all around the edge of the room. It had a strange odor. Nothing, and I mean nothing, was clean.
Furious, I decided to call the front desk... no phone... and I didn't have a cell phone. I stomped over to the door ready to storm the office. That's when I realized the lock didn't work and the door was slightly open. Opening the door I saw gang members dealing drugs in the parking lot with their "girls" standing around bored.
The door got shut, a chair shoved under the knob and I spent a fitful night trying not to get murdered. What a relief it would have been to have the power of that guarantee to get me out of a dangerous situation. Of course, without a phone I still would have had to get through the parking lot but I would have had recourse.
So lady, don't bother to whine to me about how we are so terrible and your vacation was ruined. Boo hoo bi**h.

Quality, with a "Q"

I suspect our Quality Assurance department is up to something. It is simply not possible to have so many bizaar, irritating and down right rude customers so frequently. We have customers calling repeatedly asking for information on dozens of hotels, the same thing for multiple flights as well as having us jump through the same ridiculous hoops over and over.
On woman called at least 8 times and asked about no less than 10 hotels in Las Vegas before finally booking a reservation. Thing is she was asking about the same hotels! Someone else asked about a dozen different flight scenarios, over and over. Someone else was going through itinerarys so fast there was no way possible to keep up with the multiple mind changes.
Apparently the customers we have are not bad enough, so they need to import some to us.

Beer Budget

An agent tells me:
Love it when they say they want the least expensive hotel you can get them and then when you offer it to them they sound insulted you'd even offer them that property. Then they ask the prices for 4 or 5 star hotels. And then when you give it to them they say "oh no!! I need something much cheaper!!: huh??

English, Please

A caller with a very heavy foreign accent was wanting to use reward points to pay for his hotel stay. In order to look up the point information it is necessary to have the credit card number and a few other identifying information from the card.

Me: "May I have the credit card number that has the reward points on it." (We say this because some customers have multiple cards but not multiple point programs).

Caller: "You don't need that. Do you not understand? I want to use points."

Me: "Yes sir. I understand you want to use points but I need the credit card information to access the point information. May I have the expiration date on the card please?"

Caller: "No. I'm using POINTS!"

Me: "I understand. The way the point program works is we charge the card first and the points will be used as a credit against the total of the hotel stay, so I will need the credit card information."

By now he is really exasperated and yells at me,

"Am I not speaking English? What language am I speaking? Do you not understand plain English???"

I was so tempted to say, "yes, but I don't understand you!"

What does "Not Available" mean?

She wants to go to Mexico or maybe Jamaica or maybe the Bahamas.

So I suggested she try the web site and ya wanna know what she said??

She said she couldnt figure out how to pick out a hotel, cause some of them said "not available" and how was she supposed to find out which ones were available out of those. It was too confusing for her.

May I Have Your Email Address Please.

I was trying my best to get the email address out of this woman. It was her initials followed by the @ sign and the letters NTRS. She said N like nice T like treat R like raisin and S like sugar. Reading it back to her I said her initials @ N like Nancy, T as in Tom, R like Robert and S as in Sam.

She comes back with no no no! N like nice, T like treat, R like raisin and S like sugar. So again I go through the email with N like Nancy, T as in Tom blah blah blah. For the third time she says NO! NO! NO! Can you not hear me!?! and repeats the nice, treat, raisin, sugar thing.

OK, so I say.... that would be (her initials)@N like nice, T like treat, R like raisin, and S like sugar. Big heavy sigh, yes, that's right!

An agent tells this story:

Soooooo... this idiot told me the story 3 times about a top "secret" hotel price change and I explained to him 3 times that if the hotel had a price increase that would be the current cost to book that hotel.. so he starts screaming at me what a fraud I was etc... then he said the magic words "I WANT A MANAGER" off to India he went...

Wonder if he liked that.

I have a Question...

An agent told me she had the strangest call today. The caller talked through the entire call. What was strange was she asked a bunch of questions, then answered them her self and then she hung up!

CRASH!!

It scares the livin' daylights out of me to give people info when they are calling from their cell phones from their car. Especially when they want to use their "reward points" which means they have to give the card number, expiration, verification number. You know full well their eyes are not on the road.

I actually had someone tell me he was calling from his car but added, "of course I'm hands free." Well he read off the card number to me, so he must have been eyes free as well. Then he added that he needed to be "productive" while he's driving.

I fully expect to hear the horrible sound of crunching metal and shattering glass as the occupant of the car screams in terror and agony as the car crashes. C'mon. No one is that busy that they need to risk life and limb. HANG UP AND DRIVE