First (and hopefully not last) Choice
I always enjoyed travelling, even as a boy. In fact, my passion for travel quickly led to me seeking work in the industry.
20 years on, having earned a living in some of the best-known travel companies around, I find myself providing sales and service training for a very respected car rental firm.
Having spent so long in this business, I am still amazed at how many new things I learn, even now.
Take this morning.
I had to contact my holiday company, First Choice (now part of the Tui Group, with whom I spent some very happy years in the 90s) My partner and I are heading off somewhere sunny in December and all I wanted to do was to request a window seat on the flights - a service offered by pretty much every airline I can think of. I had previously looked over the T&Cs and spotted a rather strange statement which said that customers are only able to request their seats a maximum of 90 days prior to their return flight. Because we had paid extra to request the seats, I was expecting no problems.
However the more I thought about this rule, the more absurd it sounded. We are travelling for 2 weeks but, of course, everyone on the outbound flight travelling for just one week would, in theory, be able to book their seats one whole week before us. Since our 2-week holiday was a good deal more expensive than the equivalent 1-week duration, I reasoned that this bizarre policy could easily be corrected by giving First Choice a call.
Could I really have been that naive?
One plus point for First Choice - nice local London number for their call centre - none of this 0870 nonsense. And to be fair to them, I waited no longer than 90 seconds to get through. So far so good.
The First Choice advisor told me that I would not be able to request the seats until the advertised 90 days prior to return date.
Had I seen the rules on the website, he asked.
Yes, I had, but had never seen a policy like this, could he please override this and kindly request at least the outbound seats.
No, he said, this was not possible as the system would not allow him to do this.
I explained why I felt aggrieved at this and do you know what he told me?
"There are lots of people on that flight, sir, going for 21 or 28 nights, so they will not be able to book their seats until after you."
First Choice, seriously, how much do you invest in your training? Telling a clearly frustrated customer that there are others even worse off due to your policies is NOT the way to go!
Having asked the advisor not to keep talking over me and repeating the policy over again, I requested to speak with a supervisor. At this point, I was told that a supervisor would not be able to help with this matter. I said I appreciated that, however I wanted to make them aware of my feelings on this policy. He then advised that there were no supervisors to speak to me. I said I would wait, but he insisted that no supervisors were present to deal with me and that I would have to write in. First Choice - are you seriously operating a good-sized call centre with no supervision whatsoever? How do you know if your advisors are working or all out the back having a fag? Come on!
I have to say - if you are handing out commendations for employees following your guidleines to the letter, regardless of the impact on service, then this guy deserves to be Employee of the Month.
So how did I leave it?
Well, as a last-ditch attempt at making some sense of this crazy policy, I tried their live chat.
Wow, we are talking night and day in terms of service.
This advisor went out of her way to help and within a short time, I had my seats requested. This, remember, was something the previous advisor had assured me was simply not possible.
First Choice - come on, play the game.
If I had not managed to get my beloved window seat, because they had all been taken by people paying a lot less than me, can you imagine how I would have felt? No? Well, empathy is clearly something your call centre staff are unfamiliar with, also.
Your seating policy is simply archaic - take a look at Virgin Atlantic or even one of the low-cost airlines - requesting seats (or priority boarding) X number of days before each flight is the only way this can work fairly. So what is stopping you, First Choice?
Get it changed, play fair with your customers and when you decide to properly train your call centre staff on dealing with customer conflict, you know where I am. :)
