Why hold the line? Go online

Article taken from: Financial Journal 29-03-2024
By: Uniglobe Travel

You are a business traveler and a true road warrior. A book-it-yourselfer who only necessarily travels one if possible by train. Sunday morning at the kitchen table you search for a train connection London for a day meeting. Oops a green dilemma.

Flying is much faster, cheaper and saves you an overnight stay. You book your flights over the Internet and buy off your CO2 emissions. Very economical and a bit sustainable. The Internet does exactly what you want: search, book, pay and travel. So off to London: what could go wrong?

Once in the meeting, the messages roll in on your phone: a wild public transport strike, possible disruption due to the weather, and a demonstration threatening to get out of hand. A good chance you won't make it to the airport on time. You see on your Travel app that most flights have already been canceled.

Fast into self-regulation mode, but you don't really have time for that. Cabs are "Uber-taxed" and only expensive hotels still have rooms.
The Internet seller? Well, he has his counter abroad. After some searching, I found a mail address that responds with a no-reply mail. No solution. After searching again, you find a phone number. Call center €0.80 per minute. This call can be recorded. Well, so are you by now, at the emergency room for self-bookers. Your upper pressure is rising.

To hear from the accent, they are in a distant land. A voice response directs you to a drop-down menu. Your language area is working overtime as you listen to meager music in an endless loop. You end up with a friendly chat-bot. Whether you want to speak your reservation number. "I have multiple numbers, which number do they mean?", you think.

The bot eventually redirects you to a Q&A on the website saying, "Why hold the line? Go online." Over an hour and a half later, steam is coming out of your ears. To make matters worse, the airline has automatically rebooked you to one day later from another airport.

Surely a business travel agent is not such an unnecessary luxury in such situations. We are therefore often called after such travel experiences to ask if we can arrange this from now on. By companies whose employees go on business trips a little more than once a year and experience this more often. As an employer, you have a duty of care for all employees who travel on business: Duty of Care. People want to be able to fall back on a travel expert and not a bot (we are not). And yes, we too have a booking system. We offer online if required. Rather have a travel expert anyway? We can do that too. Then, if things go wrong on the road, you have contact with someone who picks up the phone, who knows you and goes straight to work to find a suitable travel solution. Optimal unburdening. That's exactly what a business travel agent does.

Who are we? We are Uniglobe Travel. A business travel agency that knows what's going on.
www.uniglobealliancetravel.nl
sales@uniglobealliancetravel.nl

Source: Financial Journal 29-03-2024, page 9, Partner Content.