Two of our travelers had a bad experience last night just as they were about to check in to a hotel – it was in Melrose Park, a suburb of Chicago. They complained to our overnight service desk, and as one of the many hats I wear is following up on the service calls in the morning, I looked at the record to see what needed to be done. This one was documented very carefully – the agent spelled it out so there’d be no misunderstanding. The male traveler was approached by a prostitute as soon as he got out…

When the job change was first broached to me, I was assured that if I took on the international agent task (in addition to the others) I wouldn’t also be asked to take domestic calls. I chuckled then and said “Oh, I think in the real world I’ll be taking some domestic calls.” My team leader was quick to reassure me I wouldn’t. I chuckled again and said “Come on, when it gets tough you know you’re going to ask.” Monday was her first day back from vacation, and it was a tough day with long hold times. Before my…

There’s been excitement galore around the office today – a huge new shopping center opened up nearby and the parking lot is visible from our windows, high over a typical vista of mid-American stripmalls. We’d gotten used to seeing a giant empty lot, then a giant empty hole, then a giant empty store, and so on. This went on for almost 2 1/2 years, owing to some zoning hangup or other. Then it seemed that loading up the store and getting it stocked took forever – we got used to seeing a vast expanse of parking lot, with freshly painted…

I had a conversation with one of the agents earlier that got me thinking: I need some sockpuppets in order to make routine customer service calls more pleasant to handle. She was telling me an old, old story – client on the phone is not happy about some aspect of his travel, but what he’s really not happy about is actually some aspect of his company’s corporate travel policy, because he can’t get the SUV/upgrade/much more expensive hotel/ticket on a non-preferred airline that he wants. He was rude-ish to the agent and she was calling me to vent. There was…

Did I whine about it’s being International Desk Tuesday yet? No? Well, whiiiiiiiiine. Also, it’s apparently Small Hotel Group Tuesday – I’ve booked 3 small groups already (hotel groups are somewhat labor-intensive on the front end, then maintenance until they happen). Feh. And I think I have my eval today. I think I need to have this put off. David is home today, wish I were too.

It wouldn’t be a travel agent’s desk without some wacky promotional cows, now would it? Here are a few from my personal herd, courtesy of Millennium Hotels. They represent London, Los Angeles, and Beijing. Why cows? Because Millennium’s code in agency computers is “MU.”

I’m not kidding, this is what a woman caller said to one of the agents today. The call was evidently not going well, and the woman was balking on some point of the corporate travel policy. Then she interrupted the increasingly frustrated agent with this cryptic comment: “I’m not trying to be a jag-off.” So now we’re trying to figure out if she really said “jack-off”, which would be a a really weird and shocking thing for a woman executive to say in a business environment. The agent got a good laugh out of mimicking someone that sounded a lot…

When I was a kid, my dad used to take me to the airport to watch the planes land and take off. We’d drive out to the old Albuquerque airport and park somewhere along the access road near the end of the runway, and we’d sit on the hood of our green station wagon and watch for the liveries of airliners and military planes. There was nothing out there but us, the car, some tumbleweeds, the smell of aviation fuel mixed with the scent of sagebrush, and of course the planes. These days this might seem creepy; then it was…