Advocating adventures

I think I've mentioned before that I'm a pretty hard-core consumer advocate, by which I mean that I advocate strongly when those who I love (including me) are wronged in our roles as consumers. Sometimes this extends to people I don't know but love in theory--like old people--which is why I once filed a formal complaint against a company sending out subscription adds that looked exactly like bills.

Marketing, I'm okay with. Inentionally deceptive marketing with the intent to rip off those less cyncial and less capable of spotting BS than me, on the other hand, kicks in my fight-or-flight reflex and I always choose "fight."

And it pays off.

In addition to saving us literally hundreds of dollars in medical bills (I call about 95% of the insurance claims I get for an explanation and 75% of the time there is a mistake, I kid you not), my most lucrative call was to our title company upon learning that they had failed to inform us about a lein on our property put there by the city for new sidewalks when we bought our house. That call (and many subsequent ones in addition to some hefty paperwork) saved us several thousand dollars. And you all know that, though it was not a fun process, we essentially got a new bathroom for free last year after Sear's ripped our linoleum.

Sometimes I feel a little guilty for the money I save through these calls. In truth, we would have bought the house had we known about the sidewalk lein. And our bathroom needed major work even if Sear's hadn't ripped the linoleum.

However.

Today I made a call that saved my mother-in-law $125 but I'm outraged the company isn't paying more. Actually, I'm not outraged about the money as much as the employee's attitude. I have encountered inept, lazy, forgetful, and generally unhepful people. But today was the first time such a call connected me with someone who was actually disdainful of her customers from the get-go.

My incredibly generous mother-in-law, MaryJane, bought a plane ticket to Spain for her 80+ mother whose savings have been nearly wiped clean after the stock market disasters of 2001 and 2008. This will more than likely be the last big trip of Sara's life. To make it extra special, MJ is paying for all four of us (her, Sara, Josh, and I) to tour around Spain for a week and see its great cities like Barcelona, Valencia, Seville, and the like. MJ is not rich. Again, just super generous.

MJ decides to go to a travel agent to help her sort out the confusing jumble of intereraries, hotels, car rentals, flights, and the like. And, yes, I'm going to give you this travel agent's name so that you can avoid her. It's Heather. She works at Morris Murdock Travel in Orem. To make a long story slightly less long, Heather does indeed do a fair amount of legwork for MJ, then halfway through announces "I'm going to have to charge you my fee because I'm not going to make any money on anything you're booking." Apparently, Heather only gets paid for things like week-long hotel stays, two-week car rentals, and the like. Fine.

MJ gladly agrees to pay the fee and spends a ton of time on her own doing internet research that she can bring to Heather to speed the process up for her. Heather's response to MJs offerings? "I won't book that." No other explanation, no smile, nothing. Fine. She's rude.

But then MJ finds out--on her own, of course--that The Alhambra offers discount tickets for senior citizens. She wants to ask Heather if she got that discount for Sara, but at this point is too intimidated to ask her. Because, you know, why should you expect a travel agent to a) get you the best deal or b) be willing to help you?

So I volunteer to call. I promise to be nice, though firm (that's my usual MO anyway; sugar gets more flies or something like that--I was never good at cliches).

The first thing Heather says to me upon my inquiry into Alambra senior discounted tickets is "your tickets are already discounted, but I can check on that if you want." But her tone said this: "you idiot, I already did that work and the hell if I care whether you can get cheaper tickets." I asked her to check anyway, and she does.

At which point she says no other discounts are available. When I ask her the total price (which, for the record, is literally five times more expensive than the tickets available on the Alhambra website), she accidentally quotes a time first instead. This is the first that we've heard the tour starts at a specified time--we thought they were ongoing throughout the day. Turns out, the tour starts at 9:45 in the morning.

When I tell her that we can't possibly drive from Alicante, which is 3 hours away from Grenada, in time for a 9:45 am tour with a baby in tow she says "well, I asked MJ if it would work and she said yes." After politiely but ever more firmly responding "but Heather, you are the travel agent, not MJ." and her responding that she hadn't been to Spain and didn't know all the travel times between cities and me replying, "Heather, you could google that information and in 3 seconds flat determine the travel time between Alicante and Grenada," do you know what she said? "Well, I'm barely making any money on this." Was she expecting me to say, "Oh! I'm sorry, then. You're right. You were justified in booking $250 tickets that are going to be unusable. Can we pay you some more to help us like that?"

So then I told her that in the future it would be a much better policy to be clear from the beginning what would and what would not make her a commission so that all parties would be informed. I said she clearly felt resentful and that was understandable in today's internet-dominated travel environment, but that it was no excuse to give clearly inferior service and to be flat-out rude to her clients. And if she was going to behave thus every time a client unknowingly booked a trip that didn't pay her what she deemed sufficient, they deserved to know that from the outset, whether or not she "felt uncomfortable discussing her payment with them."

And, folks, it took that and much more (yes, I really am sparing you many of the details) to get her to drop the outrageous but relatively measly $125 cancellation fee for tickets we could not use. Oh, and I don't feel bad in the slightest that she'll have to eat $25 of that herself.

The thing I'm left wondering is, if our lovely Heather is any indication of a general trend, how can an industry be so self-destructive? Clearly, better deals are available on the internet. So it seems the only way a travel agent could make it in this environment short of preying on the unsuspecting, uninformed, and overly polite customers would be to engage in a little bit of CUSTOMER SERVICE!

I feel better. Do you?