Inflexibility costing you money? The main aim of the article is with the airlines, is their inflexibility and inability to handle and deal with isolated instances from a business and a clients perspective, this is after all your bread and butter on the business side and your clients over and above more important than that. Let me ask a question to both travel agents and to clients? How many times have you booked a ticket to find that you need to reroute or do a date change and the rules on the ticket are so rigid taht this is not feasible. In fact often it is better to cancel the ticket and by a new one. Here are some examples I have encountered in the past few weeks:
- Johannesburg to Miami one way via Atlanta on Delta – the client need to do a reroute ie fly to Houston – reroute was permitted however as there was no availability to book JNB-ATL-Houston , there was however availability if I booked Atlanta Houston – so what I needed was for the married segments to be broken so I could use JHB to Atlanta and the new portion to Houston – ie collect the reissue fee and keep the passenger on Delta – well nope the could not assist – only option – cancel ticket and sell on a carrier that could assist for that date and routing.
- Kulula Lumpur return in Business class – client needed to fly a day earlier and the only option was to reroute via Singapore – keep the validating carrier as Air Malaysia and reissue the ticket with the change fee. This is a R40 000 ticket. Response from Air Malaysia – No – no reroute prior to departure! No problem hand ticket in for a refund and sell the ticket on Singapore airways. So now you get R1000 cancellation fee instead of a R40 000 booking.
These are just two recent examples I have encountered which leads me to raise the question is your own inflexibility costing you money?
