TravelMole Secret Agent – No more £99 last minute deals

Well, what can l say about last month?  Busy, busy, busy.

The calls have been constant since the beginning of the month. But have they been fruitful?  Yes and no.

The earlier part of the month was great for bookings. Middle of the month l was ready to pack all my equipment up and send it back to head office.

The call quality at times was laughable. Customers still thinking that they can get away for £150! The fuel supplement alone is a third of that price.

It is so hard to to explain to customers, that gone are the days of the £99 last minute deals.  They just don’t believe you, and then you get: ‘But last year we only paid……. ‘.

Well, l think a lot of them will be staying at home this summer if they don’t rethink their budgets. The only thing that has kept me sane and focused was my good old faithful repeat customers and the other guys in my team.

But it all changed in the last week of the month. It’s like everyone has found the money tree, but more likely down to the fact that it is pay day.

Bookings have been constant, but more so for the higher end of the market, not so much the bucket and spade holidays.

Again, the general consensus with most people l have booked is that regardless of the credit crunch they are not going without a holiday. I don’t blame them.

I do have a major whine this month, and this is down to Thomson. I had an enquiry for one of their hotels in Italy. Easy, got the quote from viewdata, offered customer the price, she was happy and wanted to book. 

But she had a couple of very specific questions about the room types Thomson was offering. So, l firstly checked on viewdata on the fact file Thomson has; unfortunately it didn’t answer the questions.

So l picked up the phone to call them. l put my questions to the clerk, she didn’t know the answers. So she offered to contact hotel. 

I stupidly thought she would pick up the phone and call the hotel. No. They would contact the hotel but it would take two to three weeks for a reply. How were they going to contact them? By carrier pigeon? 

This was a late booking leaving in the next 10 days, so I couldn’t afford to wait that long. 

l called the hotel myself, asked the questions and got the answers. It took me 10 minutes and it secured the booking for me. But why should l have had to do this? 

If this had a been a small operator they would have done this for me. 

I know this is just procedure with Thomson but sometimes they just need to use a bit of common sense. I am sure they don’t want to lose customers any more than l do. 

So roll on another busy few weeks and hope for some bumper bookings. 

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