Agents Come to the Rescue of Travelers Impacted by Juno

PHOTO: Cheryl Moore of Moore and Moore Travel was able to score her client (pictured) some more time on her Cancun vacation rather than have to fly back and face travel delays from Juno. (Courtesy of Cheryl Moore)

The ASTA slogan, “Without a Travel Agent, You’re on Your Own,” never rang more true than over the past several days, as Winter Storm Juno stranded and disrupted the travel plans of thousands of passengers.

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All across the country, agents came to the rescue of their clients.

Cheryl Moore of Naperville, Ill.-based Moore & Moore Travel, a Travel Experts affiliate, received a panicked call on Sunday from a Boston-based client stranded in Cancun with five friends who were attending a music festival.

They were scheduled to return home on Tuesday. Moore had booked the travel plans for three of the five women. “The other two people I didn’t know,” said Moore. “But if I didn’t take care of them they would have had to do a lot of work and ruin their trip.”

Even before her flight was officially canceled, Moore strongly advised her client to forgo any attempt at trying to fly home. “What would be the point?” said Moore. “She’d be stuck somewhere – whether it be Atlanta or Minneapolis – so I told her to stay there at least until Wednesday or Thursday and enjoy the beach. I would change the flights so that she wouldn’t have to deal with all of this nonsense with the weather.”

But that wasn’t all. The women, high-end travelers, were staying at a mainstream property affiliated with the music festival, which wasn’t measuring up to their expectations. Moore rebooked the women at the considerably more luxurious Banyan Tree in a three-bedroom villa – and then called the property’s general manager and asked if he would upgrade the clients to oceanfront accommodations. “My client was very happy,” said Moore.

Other agents had similar stories to tell.

The secretary of six clients scheduled to return to JFK from Cancun called Mitch Gordon in a panic. “In less than two minutes we had actually reconfirmed the clients to come home on a different day,” said Gordon, director of leisure services at Wings Travel Group, a member of the Vacation.com consortium.

The clients’ hotel, meanwhile, offered them a substantially higher rate to extend their stay, one that was much steeper than the original price tag. “We went back to our tour operator and they contacted the hotel and negotiated their rate for the customer, which was a lot less than what the hotel was offering them directly,” Gordon said. “So within 10 minutes everything was rebooked, with the clients coming home on Thursday. They were so happy they were drinking piña coladas before we even got off the phone.”

Another client, an older woman scheduled to fly from Albany, N.Y., to Sarasota, Fla., on Tuesday, was overwhelmed by the prospect of exactly how to rebook the flight herself.  “She didn’t have a computer, and even if she dealt with the airlines herself she would have been on hold for two and a half hours,” said Gordon. “She was very upset and agitated, so I went online and redid her ticket for her to leave on Thursday. She was extremely happy.”

Travel Leaders Corporate, meanwhile, came to the rescues of a meetings group of 300-plus travelers scheduled to begin traveling to New York last weekend. “They proactively made a decision to cancel that group on Sunday morning,” said Kim Caniglia, senior director of operations of Travel Leaders Corporate.

From there, the company moved quickly. “We were able to make sure that all the appropriate vendor contacts were made,” she said. “We needed to get hotel and meeting space canceled in a timely manner.”

That was just part of the equation. “We also reached out to travelers to let them know we would take care of those cancellations proactively for them,” Caniglia said. “That allowed our after-hours team to really be focused on other travelers who were not impacted by that group and help them make their arrangements.”

Since the lion’s share of Travel Leaders Corporate’s staff works in a virtual environment, the company is able to nimbly mobilize in times of crisis, Caniglia said.

“Fortunately, we also have a predetermined process so if we have a situation like Winter Storm Juno we have a protocol that we go through,” she said. “First and foremost we make sure we’ve talked to the client and understand what their intentions are with that group – then we pull together and mobilize the staff.”

At Exton, Pa.-based World Travel, Inc. part of the Radius Travel Network, staff was quadrupled over last weekend. “Even though the storm wasn’t scheduled to hit the region until Monday, because the media was so great with proactive reporting, people understood ahead of time what impact it would have for travel Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday – so call volume literally increased by 100 percent,” said Pam Zager, the company’s executive vice president of operations.

By Monday evening, all affected clients had been re-accommodated.

In part, a close working relationship with its airline partners helped to ameliorate the travel crisis caused by the storm. “We are constantly monitoring and receiving information from the major carriers on their waiver policies,” said Dee Runyan, World Travel’s executive vice president of client and consulting services. “We’re then able to proactively notify clients, providing them with some relief from knowing that their carriers have waiver policies in place.”

In the end, travel professional are able to take crisis situations and make them considerably more palatable. “Although we can’t control what Mother Nature decides to do, our objective is to make that situation the best we possibly can,” said Runyan.