Travel agent rescues cancer patient’s scuttled cruise
Don’t tell Jennifer Pulles that travel agents are obsolete. Her travel professional saved the day for her parents, underscoring the value of using a human travel agent for important trips.
Pulles’ mother retired in 2006 and her father was scheduled to retire at the end of last year.
Early in 2007, my parents contacted a family friend who is also a travel agent. She helped them plan their trip of a lifetime for January 2008, after they were both retired.
They were to spend two weeks on a cruise through the Panama Canal. They had upgraded to the state rooms with the balcony and everything. Their travel agent even remarked that this was her dream cruise.
It wasn’t meant to be. Last October, Pulles’ father was diagnosed with stage four liver cancer. Her parents contacted the agent, explained the situation and requested that she make a claim under the travel insurance they had purchased.
As it turns out the agent had notes that the couple wanted travel insurance, but she had never set it up. Her parents had assumed it was set up.
After reading your site it looks like the standard practice is to say, “Sorry you have no coverage,” and leave the client out to dry.
Not this agent. She admitted that this was an oversight, contacted her errors-and-omissions insurer and made darn sure that my parents were fully reimbursed for the trip.
Did she do it because they were family friends? I doubt it, and so does Pulles. I think she would have done it for any one of her clients.
Folks, this is yet another reason to use a real, honest-to-goodness human travel agent. Because they can help when all hope is lost.
“I can guarantee you that when I go to book my honeymoon in a few months, I will be calling her to take care of me,” says Pulles. “I know that she will.”
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7 Responses to “Travel agent rescues cancer patient’s scuttled cruise”
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I hate to say it, but a story about a travel agent taking responsibility for her own colossal mistake is not exactly a ringing endorsement for using a travel agent to begin with. It may indicate that this particular travel agent at least is an honest and decent person, as most travel agents are, but I don’t see how it is a reason to use an agent vs. self booking. There are indeed reasons for using an agent, but this isn’t one of them.
The story here is not that the travel professional “saved the day” for her clients, it is that the travel professional successfully avoided an inevitable lawsuit for flushing her client’s money down the toilet; instead, the money was replaced with the agent’s, who apparently had enough cash (or Errors & Ommisons insurance of her own) to make the clients whole.
If this couple had not used a travel agent at all, and instead booked the cruise and simply wandered over to travelguard.com, spending five minutes to purchase a policy, and everything still would have been taken care of. (I’ve filed two claims with TravelGuard, and each one was taken care of with one phone call and a fax.)
On a related note,
How does one go about finding these superhuman agents you keep talking about? The ones that can make disappeared hotel bookings materialize out of thin air, can get airline customer service to actually do its job, etc. How do I tell them apart from a mindless SABRE-monkey that knows nothing outside of what appears on the computer screen? I can do that myself, thank you very much. I tried an agent when booking a hotel in London, and it turned out terribly. (Our booking didn’t get lost, but the hotel wasn’t anything like what the agent said it was…)
You keep posting stories about how Catastrophe X could have been avoided if only the hapless consumer had used an agent, and could not have been fixed otherwise. Yet I don’t recall many stories about an agent actually doing so. What exactly can an agent do to remedy catastrophe that a consumer cannot?
SirWired
I love my travel agent. You can email me if you want her address.
I won’t even bother responding to the first post……it’s too bad that some people only see lawsuits as the reason why a travel agent would actually help a client. How skewered some people’s perceptions truly are. I did get a good laugh at the “sabre monkey” comment though because of how silly it sounded.
Lisa - Good to hear that you’ve got a great travel agent!
As for the story…..the agent did what any good agent would and should do. Pure and simple.
Hey now, Canadian Agent, I did say, and do believe, that most travel agents would have done the same thing this one did, which is own up to a major mistake. Certainly this would be a reason to stay with this agent, (as opposed to using a different one) albeit with the hopes that she would be more careful in the future.
However, if the agent did not have the ready cash (or insurance), this story would have turned out much differently, and yes, a lawsuit likely would have been involved…
What I did also state was that this story was not (as Chris asserted) a reason to use an agent to begin with. There may be many reasons to use an agent, but this simply was not one of them. If I book my own insurance, there is no reason for me to worry about if my policy actually exists or not.
I do genuinely want to know how to locate a quality travel agent! The ones I keep trying (when booking something more complex than a domestic plane ticket), keep getting me the same flights, and same accommodations, at the same prices, I saw before making the trip to visit the agent. In the one case where I let an agent pick a hotel and I did no searching on my own, it did not have the one feature we requested when making the booking.
How DO I find a quality agent instead of somebody that merely runs computer searches? (Admittedly, learning to use SABRE does sure look like an adventure… it looks even worse than the system of similar vintage (mid ’60’s) that I use at my job.)
SirWired
Dear Sir Wired:
You asked, “how DO I find a quality agent instead of somebody that merely runs computer searches”?
May I suggest that you work with an agent who is a destination specialist for the area you wish you visit? That way, they won’t be just giving you suggestions based on what comes up on the computer screen; they will be suggesting hotels; sightseeing; drivers and guides based on their personal knowledge of the area, which they have learned during many trips taken there themselves, as well as passing a exam given by the tourist board of that particular destination.
I am a destination specialist for the United Kingdom and Ireland, and have been to England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland a minimum of twenty times each; and I am constantly checking out new accommodations, sightseeing, etc. so that I can keep up with things. I also am constantly checking out the accessibiity of hotels, restaurants, etc. for my clients that have physical disabilities (which is something else I specialize in). Then when a client needs help planning a trip, I ask a lot of questions regarding the type of hotel they are looking for; their budget, their tastes, etc. and match them up with the accommodation that I feel that will most meet their tastes. When you operate your travel company by being personally very knowledgeable about a destination, then your clients have excellent experiences and do not feel that their agent just picked a hotel from a computer without any more knowledge of it than a client would have.
There are destination specialists for most countries in the world; as well as speciality travel such as Adventure Travel; Disabled Travel; Honeymoons, etc. If you deal with the right agent for your interests and needs, I’m sure you will have a much more successful experience.
Best wishes,
Ann Litt
Undiscovered Britain & Ireland, Ltd.
I am with SIrWired: I don’t know a GOOD travel agent when I see (or speak to) one. They all look the same, speak the same, smile the same, and make the same promises. Years ago I made travel plans with an agent at a local agency to honeymoon in Aruba. I knew nothing about Aruba except it was supposed to be warm, have nice beaches and turquoise water. At one point the agent asked us a question which we thought nothing of at the time: do we play tennis? When we answered “no”, she went on with the planning/ticketing process. Not until after we arrived did we realize what kind of high winds Aruba has at certain times of the year: strong enough to blow half-full plastic drink glasses over and strong enough to blow sand in the air on the beach. We made the best of it of wouldn’t have chosen Aruba, at least at that time of year, had we been warned. P.S. She also booked a quaint hotel which had no air conditioning and no entertainment (music), even though it was quite warm at the time, and even though we expressed we really enjoyed night life, ala dancing, clubs, etc. Sound like we couldn’t have done just as good, or better, ourselves?
Thank you, SirWired, for the endorsement of TravelGuard. The brochure for our trip to Europe this fall has been sitting on my desk for a month now, and I’ve been debating whether to take out the insurance or not. Sounds like I’d better get busy and send in a check!