Travel-Agent Consortia Form a Vital Link in Paris, or A Tale of Two Partners
by Cheryl Rosen /With “hundreds of customers in Paris” this past weekend, James Phillips, vice president sales and marketing GTA Americas and president of Travel Bound, said his alliance with a travel-agency consortium helped his company, his customers, and his travel agency partners.
“Paris is always a major destination; the classic London-Paris-Rome is a very large part of our business,” Phillips told TMR. So when shots rang out on Friday, his first concern was just to locate everyone.
There is an 800 Global Assist number for consumers to call, of course. But in an emergency, you cannot wait for every customer to call you.
“We proactively reached out to every hotel,” Phillips said. “We called every single hotel supplier to verify that every traveler was accounted for, and then the first people we called after that were our consortium partners, to let them know that 100% of their customers were accounted for globally. The great thing about having a consortium is the efficiency in communication, particularly when things go wrong.”
With everyone safe, the next step was to secure accommodations for anyone who had been displaced. Then came what Phillips called the “knock-off” consequences, “making sure everyone’s itineraries are held together” despite the closure of Paris airports and “major disruptions getting out.”
Over the weekend, Phillips sent a personal note to every consortium “to take some of the distress away,” and make sure they understood that their guests would be accommodated despite disruptions to their plans.”
On Monday, he sent another, and posted updates on Facebook as well.
“The phones are busy, but there is not a huge volume of cancellations,” Philips said. For the time being, the company is “working with any customer who has concerns” about traveling to Europe and waiving all fees unconditionally.
In the end, he thanks his consortia partners for keeping the lines of communication open and streamlined.
“For us to be able to go to one place and distribute messages to hundreds of travel agencies is a really efficient way to communicate,” he said.