Post Hurricane Odile, An Agent Scrambles to Get Clients Home

PHOTO: Tourists await transportation home after Hurricane Odile. (Courtesy of Natashia Stevenson)

Travelers weren’t the only ones looking for ways to get out of Los Cabos in the aftermath of Hurricane Odile. Their travel agents were working right alongside them.

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Such was the case for travel agent Piper Fenton, who did everything possible to ensure that her clients, a couple from Portland, Ore., arrived home as soon as was humanely possible.

Fenton had been communicating with her clients up until the point that Hurricane Odile hit Los Cabos late on Sunday Sept. 14. “We were in touch Friday before the storm and I said, ‘You can change your ticket to come home Saturday, because there’s nothing available on Sunday, but you’ll have to pay a change fee,’” said Fenton of Remarkable Honeymoons in Portland.

Unfortunately, the clients, who were staying at Secrets Puerto Los Cabos, chose not to pay the $125 change fee and instead weather the storm.

“We were in contact until they went into the shelter at the hotel and then I didn’t hear from them until Tuesday morning when they had been evacuated from the hotel to the airport where they boarded a military plane to Mazatlan,” said Fenton. “All day Tuesday I worked on trying to get them home.”

In Mazatlan, Alaska Airlines said it would bring a plane in that would transport travelers to San Diego – if there were 150 people who needed to be flown out. But those arrangements were up in the air, as there were only 80 travelers for the flight, Fenton said.

In the meantime, Fenton and Classic Vacations, the tour operator that she had used to book the couple on the Los Cabos vacation, put together myriad alternate routes for the clients that were scheduled later that week as a backup plan.

Then, Alaska brought a plane into Mazatlan for the flight to San Diego, and also booked the couple from San Diego to their final destination, Portland.

Fenton said her clients remained relatively calm throughout the whole ordeal. “They weren’t upset and screaming and yelling. They were patient.”

She said they were grateful they had a travel agent making alternate arrangements for them.

Fenton, who read the TravelPulse account of the couple and their five children who were stranded in Los Cabos in the aftermath of Hurricane Odile, noted how much better off they would have been had they used a travel agent to book their vacation.

“An agent would have told them to get out of that house first of all, and go to a shelter set up by the city,” she said. “And then they didn’t have anybody to help them in getting flights home. I don’t know if they even realized that they would have had more assistance if they had a travel agent.”