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Dial A Rant: Res Agents Get Snippy
The Travel Critic · January 5, 2000

It’s bad enough that phone res agents toil thanklessly away in cube farms somewhere out in the Midwest. But lately, they’ve also become the forgotten victims of the passenger rights revolution.

Yes, it’s true. Travelers aren’t the only ones who are suffering. “The American public has been more abusive towards airline employees as the days go on,” complains Tim Calandrino, a reservations supervisor for a major U.S. carrier. “Just today, I had a customer wanting compensation for a five-minute delay on arrival — and it was due to weather.”

The res agents — those folks who fix your itinerary on the phone but who only seem to have a first name and an extension — are feeling the brunt of travelers’ frustrations. “I actually expect airline employees to be rude jerks — and am rarely wrong,” says reader William Bozic. But, he concedes, he also knows how difficult the reservationists’ job is because his cousin works for a major airline. “Their suffering is understood,” he says.

Some passengers aren’t as sympathetic. When Amanda Glover tried to cancel a ticket through an airline’s “800” number, she met a wall of resistance and rudeness.

“The first lady tells me that I should wait until the ticket was issued and to call back, and they could probably issue me a credit,” she says. “So I wait and call back and am rudely told that I cannot get a refund or credit; they never do that; it’s not possible in their system, and that I shouldn’t have waited until the ticket was issued. I politely tell her that another employee told me to do that and that, in fact, it is possible to do something to help my situation. They then referred me to complaints line.”

Of course, we all know what happens when you’re referred to the complaints line — usually nothing.

Although there are no studies and, truth be told, no practical way of measuring this kind of shift in behavior, I can vouch for the fact that reservations agents are becoming more and more defensive.

Last week, an Avis phone agent cut me off several times while I tried to explain my itinerary to her. I was arriving at an airport where the car rental counter closed at 2 a.m. and where my flight, a red-eye from Las Vegas, was coming in at 1:30 a.m. I wanted to make sure the office would be open when I arrived. The agent didn’t let me talk — she cut in, anticipating that I might complain (I wasn’t going to).

After I hung up, I felt a little shellshocked. I concluded that the agent had been so traumatized by a long history of abusive callers that she’d built a defensive shield around her. She was just protecting herself.

I’m not a psychologist, so I called one to get more insights into the rising tensions between passengers and employees. Lillian Glass, author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Verbal Self-Defense, attributes the growing conflicts to agents, not travelers.

“Reservationists tend to be condescending; they don’t communicate well; they come off sounding like robots reading from a script,” she says. “People want to pick up the phone cord and strangle them.” Glass says operators would benefit from better training and an understanding that “the customer is always right.”

I’m with her on that. No matter how discourteous the callers are, it’s the reservationists’ responsibility to remain calm, civil and friendly. Even if they don’t want to be. Even if the person on the other end of the line is downright cruel.

But the real villains in all of this aren’t the phone agents. They’re the agent’s employers — the ones whose thoughtless service cutbacks gave birth to the passenger rights movement in the first place.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator and author of A Bridge to Nowhere: A Year in the Florida Keys. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion.