Yes, Travel Advisors Have Travel Issues, Too!

I as at my BNI Networking meeting yesterday morning when I get a text from Delta: “Your departure flight from Wichita to Minneapolis/St Paul will be delayed 45 minutes.” Now, I’m thinking, “this isn’t good. I only had an hour layover at MSP to catch the flight to Ft. Lauderdale.” This was a one-day training opportunity I had earned a space in after competitive evaluation — so it did not want to miss it! And since my Wichita flight left at 3:15pm and was now departing a bit after 4, you know I was on the last flight of the day out of MSP for FLL.

Not willing to spend the night in MSP and miss most of the class, I started doing the same things I do for any customer who hits in-travel issues. Except since I was doing it for myself and was on the way across town to another meeting when I was doing this, it became 45 minutes in my car, parked in front of a local business, working my phone.

Long story short: after some investigation I found I had a chance to get out of ICT and go through Dallas Fort Worth on American Airline to Miami, leaving an hour earlier and getting in about the same time. (Let’s not factor in the additional hour driving to get to my hotel and renting a car I didn’t think I was going to need but am glad I ended up needing.)

So I got it booked and here’s the Facebook account of the rest of the day:

(Yeah, that last one I cropped a bit too tight…)

Today’s Takeaway

• Travel Insurance: worth its weight in GOLD! It will make this situation come out just fine.
• Travel advisors are sometimes horrific at following our own advice: I didn’t use my resources — in this case travel insurance concierge service.
• I picked a late flight because of a local conflict. ALWAYS fly early in the day when it’s time-sensitive.
• Booking directly, myself, rather than through the tools I use to book customer flights. That left me without another two levels of resource for help. Had I booked this through our air program, I’d have had 24/7 support that could have handled the rebooking for me.
• When you hit the travel hiccup (they happen), be calm, consider your options and call a friend. Me. I’ll find the best option possible and work with my resources to get you that result.
• Finally, be prepared, sometimes the best response that meets your goals is to change plan mid-stream, pay for what you need to pay for, and let the sservice providers and travel insurance work it out for you on the back end.

…oh, and we learned Scott’s main coping tool when he hits a difficult situation is social media snark.