Today all of our clients decided that they needed to change their flights to something else. Well, all is an overstatement. Probably only 90% of them or something like that. Seriously, by midday I wanted to just open the phone call by asking them what they needed to change.
This type of day is exhausting because each and every airline has become incredibly complicated about their rules. It used to be that if you were still staying over a Saturday night and you had similar availability then you could pay a simple $100 change fee and you'd be done. Now the fee has gone up to $150 on some airlines but stayed $100 on others. More fares are dependent on how many days you stay and even what time of day the flight was intended for. Even more difficult are the (growing number of) fares that require you to price everything brand new without any credit for the two weeks advance that you originally booked it for! That almost always adds another $400 or $500 to your price.
The ticketing game is rigged in the sense that the tickets are far too complicated for a layman to navigate without incurring extra charges. To make it worse, when the airlines start changing their policy they don't really tell anyone. We find out when they start charging us for making mistakes. I hope that some large travel agency (like mine) will take them to court some day for fraud or negligence.
If I had one piece of advice for a business trying to cut travel cost, it would be to try and eliminate or reduce this type of charge. The first place to start would be not to change meeting times. We run into this frequently where a meeting is moved up three hours and four people have to spend a couple grand to get there at the new time. I doubt there is ever a $2000 reason for the time change.
Second bit of advice? Go easy on those travel agents. They've got a tough job some days and being a jerk to them won't help you at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment