Memoir of a Retail Travel Agent

With the introduction of electronic ticketing (e-ticket), I realised that fare basis may be a thing of the past as it is not printed on the e-ticket. It is too bad for the travellers who won't have a chance to realise how much fun it was to decode fare basis and learn its importance. Of course, they can be among the meaningless jiberish printed on an airlines ticket which hardly anybody bother to look at, except when you work as a travel agent.

I was a travel agent.

Retail travel agency work was mundane. For me, it was always about getting ahead in sales, giving advice to places you dreamed of going but have never been, and convincing customers why they should make the booking with you and not others.

There were the fun part of course, like travel educational - cheapish tailor made itinerary for travel agents only but they rarely came about, booking exotic holidays (wow I just made a booking for the Trans-Siberian) or planning a round-the-world trip for customers, however these instances were rare as our client base was mainly students and backpackers who usually go on the standard big trip after finishing their education (almost always to London).

I've also came across many interesting people as a travel agent. I once had a young lady coming to request a round-the-world travel quote from me. For those in the know, all round-the-world airfares are based on the mileage use, and how many airports enroute in order to calculate airport taxes and surcharges, in order to give an accurate quote a travel agent must has all that information.

To get these information, I begun by asking her the standard questions and the conversation went something like this:

Me: where would you like to go to?

Girl: where can I go?

Me: it is round-the-world fare, you can go anywhere, so long it is the same direction, like going from east to west.. So, where would you like to go to?

Girl: Er, where can I go??

This went on for a little bit and by the rate it was going she wasn't going anywhere, so I took out a brochure with a map of the world and placed it in front of her, in your heart, where do you really, really want to go?, she looked at the map, err, India... Thailand... London?. Great, I thought, that's something so I started to check the fares for her, while I was doing that, she looked up from the map, puzzled, where's India? Where's Thailand?

Wow...

Obviously this young lady isn't ready for her adventure yet if she has no clue where the countries are and so long she was in front of me, I was losing out on real bookings with serious customers so I gave her the brochure, told her the approximate airfare range she is looking at. I've also asked her to have a think about the destinations, I would be very happy to get an exact quote for her once I work out the routes.

Yes, it was unfortunate about the bottom line (real bookings) but some people obviously has no clue when comes to travel, yet it was these people that made days in the retail travel agency easier to pass by. Well, sometimes the joke was on us travel agents as well, especially when comes to making mistakes... When a travel agent makes mistake, it hurts big time.

I remember screwing up a connecting flight between Auckland and Frankfurt for a wealthy Russian university student who spent USD12,000 on a one-week Christmas break in Europe with her Gucci clad boyfriend, she had to delay her travel for one day because of my mistake.

My other major screw ups include booking the wrong month for a hotel room in New York City - customers were already in the US and noticed the date was incorrect, and another case, the wrong hotel in Hong Kong for a New Caledonian based customer. Yikes.

Booking the wrong booking class for air travel was also common, fortunately I usually managed to get away with that by either begging the airlines to do a waiver or offering the customer a discount, hurting the bottom line.

Fortunately, we all learn from our mistakes quickly or we suffered monetarily. 2.5 years in the retail travel agency business was enough for me, nonetheless it was my first real job after university and it has taught me a lot. I have met a lot of fantastic people and made some good friends, it was fun but never again. I think, deep down, I am still that geeky travel agent because I like studying the jiberish on an air ticket!