Back in the day, before I moved into writing about the industry I love, I was a Travel Agent too. This week I’m feeling a little nostalgic, so I want to take you with me for a trip down memory lane.
Here’s a piece I wrote back when I was a consultant.
It’s about customers looking for the cheapest flight at all costs – well, at no cost, if possible!
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“I want your cheapest flight to x.”
“Just the cheapest.”
“Whatever’s cheapest.”
“I want cheap!”
They say the most googled word on the internet is “cheap”. In a regular day at work, I must hear that word maybe 50 times, if not more.
But how does one define “cheap”?
And does one really want cheap, when all the facts of the matter are laid bare on the table?
In my experience, no.
They do want the cheapest flight, but they still want to fly with Emirates or another premium carrier, and no, they don’t want to wait more than 2 hours in transit.
And of course they want the most direct flight possible.
Unfortunately, like the rest of the real world, there is often a trade off between the cheapest and the best-est. Rarely is cheap best. Often times, cheap is cheap; and I mean that in the derogitve sense.
In an effort to investigate the differing conceptions of “cheapness” out there amongst the travelling public, I asked one of my potential clients (yes, still only a potential) the following question: “When you say you want the cheapest flight to x, what would price would you consider as cheap?”.
And this is how she responded: “I, of course, consider cheap as a possible lower price”.
Insightful.
It hit me in that moment that it’s not so much the price itself that motivates people to buy, but they want to pay less than what is currently on offer. The buying public want to get that “good deal” that no-one has has got or even heard of.
Needless to say, I offered this client a concrete price after reading her reply, but I have not heard back since. I could have offered her a possible lower price, but I could only offer her an actual price.
It is often the case that consumers hold out on booking their flights because of the possibility in finding a lower price elsewhere. For them, just as the truth is out there, a possible lower price is out there too.
But rabies is out there too.
So instead of going around to agent to agent in the hope of scoring that possible better deal, perhaps just save your energy and book the flights at a reasonable price that actually exists. You’ll be making your Travel Agent’s day!
And so was another day at the travel agency.
*Read 7 reasons why you should never book with a Travel Agent.
