Who wants to be a tour operator? I mean a tour operator who tries to do a good job. This must be the year for schedule changes by the airlines we use.
Alitalia put on all sorts of Stansted departures and at very good rates, too. We based our Italian programme on its Stansted schedules.
The Stansted to Pisa route has now been cancelled and so has Manchester to Milan. Air Namibia has cut down its services from London to Windhoek from three a week to one a week even though it had promised that, after a disastrous 1998 with many flight changes, it would not repeat the flight cancellations in 1999.
For the past three weeks we have been rebooking in the region of 200 people travelling to Namibia who are taking very complicated tailor-madeholidays.
We have been virtually unable to process new bookings and our business has suffered as a result. In the Azores, Air Portugal handed over some key routes to SATA, a local airline. For a few weeks we were unable to confirm anything at all.
When it was all sorted out we at least managed to process the bookings we had. Now, SATA has changed all its schedules and we have to reprocess several hundred bookings.
Cyprus Airways changed the time of its Gatwick to Paphos scheduled flight, which hashad historical slots for several years, and Britannia has now moved the timing of its Lutonto Paphos flight 1he 20mins earlier.
And what about the British Airways time and day changes to the Caribbean?
All in all, we have several thousand bookings which have been affected. We have to tell all these people. Many will complain and spend hours on the telephone asking why the changes have been made.
Some will cancel, many will form a poor impression of our company, not understanding how much this whole exercise is costing us in time, money and frustration right at the start of the season.
Our staff are employed to make bookings, not to sort out other suppliers’ problems for them.
And which of these airlines has offered us any discount and an apology for what has happened? You will not be surprised to learn that all this is done on faxes which just turn up one morning. We are not even sure the reasons for the changes that we are given are true.
Basically, we have to face the fact that we contract on the basis of a particular schedule and that the airline can just change the schedule to suit its own ends. Those who make the changes do not have to face the clients, do not have to spend the thousands of pounds in time, postage and telephone costs in order to part salvage the situation. Both agents and customers think we are incompetent and that we are somehow to blame for the inconvenience that they have been caused. And remember, these changes are made to either make or save someone, somewhere a lot of money.
I have always maintained that you cannot make big money without exploiting someone or something. Here we, the customers, are being exploited.
Of course we could just say nothing to the clients, just send them the tickets in due course and then wait for them to ring us up and have a moan. That’s how tour operators get a bad name and we don’t deserve it. So many of our rich suppliers hide behind our skirts when it suits them.