My last final exam (hopefully ever) will be tomorrow, so I should really be focusing more on schoolwork than “work,” but I’ve nonetheless been trying to finish up a few award bookings today. Every once in awhile I run into some sort of an issue, but today is just one of those where I should give up and call it a day.
This morning I had to call Delta eight times to add an Alitalia segment. Space was there, but the first seven agents just weren’t intelligent enough to “request” Alitalia space. Funny enough the first agent added the segment incorrectly, so I asked the next agent to remove that segment. She said she didn’t know how, and asked if I couldn’t do it. After a 30 minute hold, the eighth agent was finally able to do it.
Along the same lines, in the process of booking a revenue ticket for someone this morning, I got into an argument with a “supervisor” over what constitutes back-to-back ticketing. For those of you not familiar with back-to-back ticketing, it’s when you try to circumvent fare rules by booking multiple tickets. For example, say you want to travel from Tampa to Singapore, but only for one day. Most cheap fares have a six-day minimum stay requirement, so if I booked two separate roundtrip tickets, one from Tampa to Singapore and one from Singapore to Tampa, with the purpose of circumventing the fare rules, that would be back-to-back ticketing.
This “supervisor” claimed a simple roundtrip ticket with only 90 minutes at the destination was back-to-back ticketing. Sorry lady, that’s what we call a roundtrip ticket with a really quick return. She (the supervisor) was in India, so I found it ironic when she said: “well this reservation was made with the Manila call center, they tend to make a lot of mistakes.” Nah, in this case, they were right and you were wrong. While I always try to be nice, I just couldn’t help but get a bit pushy. I was dumb for playing along, as I called back right away and had the problem sorted out in under a minute, as opposed to the hour I spent on the phone with her (yes, I don’t always follow my own advice).
Then I tried to make a change on a US Airways itinerary, only to get three agents in a row that claimed changes can’t be made to any US Airways itinerary once they’re ticketed, and that the reservation would have to be canceled and we would have to start all over. In fairness, that’s just another day with US Airways for me. 😉
OK, I give up. Back to studying operations and supply chain management…
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