Coming out of retirement

The Spring Festival is soon approaching with everyone trying to finalize their travel plans and we are no exception.

Now that Mark found out about the dates that he can take off we started working on our itinerary Laos and Cambodia. We headed to the travel agency on Saturday and held tentative reservations. They were more expensive than we orginally thought, with flights that took longer than our trip back from Chicago to Shanghai.

I corresponded with our agent back and forth during the week to try and see what other options we had but space was limited. Apparently everyone inside and outside of China are travelling during this time period. FYI, for anyone thinking of travelling during this time period either within China or Asia, it's very busy so make travel plans early.

As our agent provides me with a couple of options there are flights within our itinerary that are waitlisted. I advise her that we will take the original flight even though it means travelling the entire day back to Xiamen. She emails me back to say that it was cancelled and of course my question back to her would be why? Of course no response. So I call the agent and she informs me that the airline cancelled the ticket because of the missed deadline. What deadline I ask? There was no mention of the ticket deadline when we held the reservation and I have a witness, my husband. (no I didn't say that). Okay now I'm starting to sound like all those clients of days gone by. She then informs me that the airlines just cancel the ticket when no payment is given and space is tight on the aircraft. Okay, that's a new one to me no payment I get, but when the flights are tight they make up a date so that they can cancel the reservation? At this point it really doesn't matter who or what happened what we need are 2 tickets to our destination.

The day was spent instant messaging our agent to figure out what flights were available to us. What I find interesting, and what I heard so many times during my years in the travel industry was the complaint that the agent didn't show any originalilty when searching for flights. I can see why clients get frustrated but I also know that I'm not the only client that she has, and instead of pointing out what she didn't do, it's best to work with the agent and see if the issue can be resolved. Most of the day was looking into various options to see what would work with our timeframe.

The day was successful and we now have 2 seats going to Cambodia and Laos. Who says I don't have patience?