Not even a nation-wide airport strike in Italy was enough to stop this Travel Agent from making sure her clients’ honeymoon to Venice continued as planned.
Ah, the things Travel Agents do for love.
Meet Gina Edwards, a Personal Travel Advisor with MTA Travel.
She believes in love, and she believes that all honeymoons should go ahead as planned!
Gina woke up one Saturday morning to emails from a supplier and a cancelled flight with Alitalia from Athens to Venice, with no re-accommodation. The cause: those Italian air traffic controllers had called a nation-wide strike, starting at noon that same day.
A pretty crappy scenario to wake up to for any Travel Agent. But get this: Gina’s clients were actually on their honeymoon, and were due to fly to Venice to continue their romantic escapade. For Gina, come hell or high water, there was simply no way ANYTHING was going to get in the way between her clients and Venice!
These are not Gina’s clients
So what did she do?
She put her travel agent superhero searching skills to the ultimate test, and ended up finding a couple of Business Class seats from Athens to Milan that would depart before the strike officially started. They were the last two seats too, so she held them in and got in contact with the two love birds:
“I called my clients at their hotel and advised them of the situation and my solution, which was: Get up now, pack and go to the airport, fly to Milan, then take a train from Milan airport to Venice.”
Gina Edwards, Personal Travel Advisor, MTA Travel.
Talk about being resourceful!
So that was the flying part sorted, but she still had to try and figure out how to get her clients to Venice from Milan. Taking a train was going to be the option here. However, she couldn’t organise it from her end. But in her experience as a Travel Agent such land sectors were never much of an issue, so she felt confident that this final part of the journey wouldn’t be an issue.
“The only thing I could not organize was the train, but I assured them it would be easy to do this. They agreed and I arranged for MTA after hours ticketing to issue the business class tickets.”
With the plane tickets issued and her clients on her way, the only thing left for Gina to do was sit back and wait for them to email her once they had checked into their hotel in Venice.
“Half an hour before I had calculated I should be hearing from them, I received an email; a selfie with the Grand Canal in the background! The honeymoon continued as though nothing had happened!”
No, Gina. Something did happen. You came to the rescue, and for this you should be applauded!
Check out some of our other Travel Agent to the Rescue stories, here, here and here.
*Do you have any of your own stories of how you saved the day for a client? Email shaun@karryon.com.au and you could have your story published!
