| Journal: TWUK | Section: |
| Title: | Issue Date: 29/05/00 |
| Author: | Page Number: 10 |
| Copyright: Other |
Premium-rate telephone calls certainly don’t ring our bell
I would echo last week’s comments regarding principals which profit from the practice of keeping agents held on-line during a national or premium-rate telephone call.Can any of them really justify agents being obliged to cover part of their communication costs in this way?
Even supportive principals like Travel 2 (which has almost exclusively 0870 numbers) seem to be guilty of this.
Surely the prize for barefaced cheek should be awarded to Ryanair.
Even if one accepts that agents were reluctant to book Ryanair at 7.5%, let alone 5% commission, we still get schedule changes on past bookings (several a week at present). When these are not convenient to our mutual passengers a call is necessary – at 25p per minute.
As the agents’ number is often engaged, one assumes that Ryanair staff are busy most of the time and assuming that the call-centre staff are not paid £15 per hour, not only do we pay for the full wage bill, we also incur a booking fee from the airline that does not allow us to levy something similar to recover some of our own costs !
Steve Nicholls
Powell and Coates Travel
Ipswich
Suffolk