Hannah Vincent was on a day off when she received an enquiry that led to the biggest booking of her career – worth nearly £450,000.
The managing director of Select World Travel in Poole got a text message from a regular client as she took her baby daughter Leah to a ‘mini gym’ session.
“They wanted a long-haul trip for a family group of 29,” Vincent said. “I had to wait until my daughter was having her afternoon nap before I could start work on it – I was desperate to get her to bed!
“As soon as she was asleep, I contacted Andy Dawson in the reservations department at Lusso as he had looked after them previously.”
After working on the 10-day booking to the Seychelles for just over a week, Hannah was copied in to the family’s emails.
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She said: “I was out for dinner on a Saturday night, but I replied straight away to a few questions on email – I knew it’d be worth it.
“From then on, I was on tenterhooks and checked my emails until 10pm every night so I didn’t miss any family questions!”
Vincent, who works four days a week, spent another week working on the booking, often out of office hours – including securing all 29 flight seats on a Sunday from home.
She said: “Some wanted business-class, some premium economy and it had to be direct. Andy and I ended up speaking on a Sunday night to confirm things: it would have put a spanner in the works if we hadn’t done that.
“It took a while to work out the accommodation in two-bed villas, senior and junior hotel suites.”
By the Friday of that week, the £448,685 booking to Constance Lemuria in Praslin in the Seychelles was confirmed for later this year.
Vincent won a Lusso agent incentive for a seven-night holiday to the Maldives for her booking.
She added: “Lusso had already planned to take agency staff to dinner, but now they’ve said we’ll all get champagne!”
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