Travel agents have proved they really earn their keep, judging by some of the odd requests they’ve received recently.
Agents shared their daftest enquiries with the Travel Gossip Facebook group, proving that people do still need an agent when it comes to booking a holiday.
For example, free child places can often seal the deal, but not all customers realise there is an age limit on the offer. One client asked for a family holiday for two adults and two children ‘ideally with a free child place… somewhere hot’. When asked the children’s ages, she replied: “They’re 21 and 23.”
One potential customer was confused by the flight time to Rhodes, phoning an agent to say: “I need the flight out to be the two-hour one.”
When asked what she meant, she said: “I’ve been looking at all dates, and I can see the flight time out is 4.5 hours and the one back its only two hours, so I need the flight out to be two hours as well.”
When the agent explained that all timings are local, and Greece is two hours ahead of the UK, the client hung up.
One agent said a client who was travelling business class to New York called to ask what the travel time difference would be if he upgraded to first. The agent said: “I told him about two seconds quicker.”
Agents often pull out all the stops, but cannot perform miracles. One told us: “A customer contacted me and said he had booked direct with easyJet and they had changed his flight time. He asked if I could change it back.”
Another, who had booked a Rhine cruise for a client, was asked if she could contact the captain and ask him to sail after midnight so the client could meet her friend in one of the ports for dinner.
As we know, customers often want to get the best price, but budgets can be unrealistic. One customer asked an agent: “Can you do any better on £179?”, while another said they wanted to spend ‘£3-4k’ on a seven-night all-inclusive to Greece for four adults and five children aged between nine and 17. The agent double checked that the client meant per person, but the reply came back ‘in total’.
Meanwhile, geography is not always a customer’s strong point. Agents told us they’d had requests for a pyramid-view room for an Egypt Red Sea holiday and sea-view rooms in Austria and Marrakech.
One client responded to an advert for a Dubai-Mauritius twin-centre and was ‘really keen’ but wanted to switch Mauritius for Jamaica. The agent said: “She’s a teacher – obviously not a geography teacher.”
Other odd requests have included a client who wanted to return to the Maldives, but asked: “Can you recommend an island where there’s not many fish in the sea as my wife does not like anything slippery slapping against her legs?”
And one customer asked: “But if I have a swim up room how do I get my cases there without them getting wet?”
Finally, as we know, there are a lot of ‘travel experts’ around. One client only returned to book after checking out the information her agent gave her with ‘Sandra from Slimming World’.
January always delivers… so don’t hold back. Share your best stories from peaks in the Travel Gossip Facebook group, from laugh-out-loud moments to the most annoying or utterly ridiculous customer enquiries.
