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Coworker Makes Massive Error, Called Client to try to fix, Client Thinks He Knows More than Me

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I work for a travel agency that operates like a call center and is associated with a bank. A few days ago, a client asked me to place flights on hold and I tell him he needs to call back to book when he’s ready as the airline would only allow a hold for 48 hours maximum (pretty generous compared to the 24 hour hold). 48 hours later, I get a system message saying flights were to set to auto cancel at midnight unless purchased.

I’m used to seeing that so I don’t think anything of it at first, until I see a coworker (CW) on the morning shift had applied the client’s credit card points to the booking but did not send the flights over to our ticketing team to issue tickets. The coworker did not write any notes at all (which means I have now to call the client and confirm he wanted to purchase the flights) and of course, he was out of office. I also noticed CW failed to reprice the flights so that it reflects the current fare. While we can hold flights, we are not able to guarantee the price until the client authorizes it and tickets are issued. If the client calls back even 8 hours later, we price it again and make sure what we quoted is valid or tell them what the new fare is.

I call the Client (we’ll call him Bob) and he is understandably irritated at me calling him in the evening.

Me: I apologize for the late call, Bob, but I placed flights on hold for you a couple days ago and I was following up. Were you wanting to buy the tickets?

Bob: Yeah, I already called this morning and spoke to CW and it’s been taken care of.

Me: I unfortunately didn’t see any notes from CW. The reason why I’m reaching out is because the flights are still on hold and tickets haven’t been issued.

Bob: What do you mean? I already got my seats and you emailed me.

Me: I do see that but what I’m saying is that it did not get sent to our ticketing team by CW for you to actually have tickets for your flights. I can get it fixed but I’ll need to confirm the price-

Bob: \*getting more annoyed\* Why are we doing this again? CW already told me!

Me: He quoted you the price I quoted you…48 hours ago. The current fare per person for your flights is $500 higher.

Bob: That’s ridiculous! The price was lower than that.

Me: I’m very sorry about this and because of the fare difference and CW not having sent this to our ticketing team when you called 12 hours ago, I can send to the ticketing team now at the current price and have a case opened to review and credit the fare difference due to it not being advised to you properly- (Not ideal but that’s what we do in situations like this)

Bob: CW applied my points (based on the old fare so not the correct amount of points), I got my itinerary, what is the problem??

Me: Tickets were never issued for the flights and the fare CW quoted is incorrect-

Bob: YES THEY WERE, THEY WERE ALREADY TICKETED (They aren’t). I DON’T NEED TO DEAL WITH THIS SHIT RIGHT NOW, STOP BOTHERING ME AND JUST DO WHATEVER YOU NEED TO DO. \*hangs up\*

Me: ……

He was rightfully annoyed but he only made matters worse by arguing that I was wrong. Why would I bother you if everything was all taken care of? If I was a worse person, I would’ve just notated that he hung up on me, moved on, and let him find out on his travel date that he has no flight ticket and the citation would go to CW.

A supervisor pulled the call and it was revealed CW made major errors:

1. Didn’t recap the flight information.
2. Didn’t ask for the client’s passport information since it was an international itinerary.
3. Didn’t reprice the itinerary to correctly advise the current fare, just used my expired fare quote.
4. Didn’t send the itinerary to be ticketed so his entire trip was hours away from being canceled
5. Left zero notes for me or anybody else to go off of.

I was able to get special airline approval to honor the original fare and sent it back to ticketing but CW is still likely to be cited because had I not caught the error and called Bob when I did, his flights would’ve been canceled out and he might not have known until it was too late.

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