How to make fans
I seem to recall that customer service is not what happens during regular business. But what happens when the extraordinary happens. During this time of crisis my family has first hand experience in what that means.
My wife was born and raised in the Philippines and while she’s now a happy citizen of Iceland, she does like to visit her friends and relatives. When we started our relationship she decided to move to Iceland. I was determined that she should always be able to go home on a very short notice.
Getting to the Philippines from Iceland has never been all that simple. It’s 8 time zones away. It’s so far away that there are no direct flights. I can imagine what it was like before the advent of easy air travel. Weeks on a ship. It’s almost on the other side of the globe. So essentially you need to fly from Iceland to Europe. While it would take you the same amount of time going to America and from there to Asia. It’s way more expensive. There’s a historical reason for that. Basically airlines decided to split the world into zones and charge fares based on those zones. So going from Iceland (in Europe) to Asia — you just go through 2 zones. Do it via America and you go through 3 zones. There’s more stuff involved. But that is the basic reason why it’s cheaper to go via Europe than America.
So we’ve tried a few different routes. My wife even more. There are certain ways you can save a bit of money on the fare. But sometimes those will involve doing weird routing. One time we flew via Copenhagen, London and Hong Kong to the Philippines. Because the cost of the ticket by going first to Copenhagen was 20% lower. Basically we bought a flight to Copenhagen from Iceland. Then another flight from Copenhagen to the Philippines. This can be a risky way to save money if anything happens to your first flight. Sometimes we used online travel agencies that we had no experience with and came to regret it later. One time my wife was almost stuck in Amsterdam on her way home because the travel agency didn’t properly issue her ticket. So it was impossible to check her onto the Icelandair flight. Absolutely no way to reach the travel agency. She was in panic mode. I’ve got travel industry experience and I knew what the issue was. So was able to get help via the fantastic Icelandair call service staff. After years of travel we now pay a slight premium for peace of mind. We deal with respected travel agencies and full service airlines when we do these long distance flights.
So when she told me about her plan to visit the Philippines during Easter towards the end of 2019. I started looking at our options. My first choice is always to book direct with airlines. It makes it easier if something happens. Second choice is to use a well respected online agency. Since my wife would be travelling alone. We decided to go with a nice schedule and quality airlines. So we booked our flight via Expedia.ie on British Airways. Well mostly on British Airways. It was with BA from Iceland via London to Hong Kong. From Hong Kong to the Philippines it was Cathay Pacific and then Philippines Airlines on the way home. Was a relatively nice schedule. No massive waiting times. All 3 airlines are well known for good service. By early January we started seeing some news coming from Asia about a new virus. I remember both SARS and MERS and I’ve seen enough movies like Contagion to realize that this might be the start of something serious. But at first it seemed like this might be contained. We all know that turned out to be a false hope.
By February it was becoming clear that my wife would probably not be going to the Philippines. The Philippines implemented a travel ban on all travel via Hong Kong to the Philippines and it seemed unlikely that would be lifted before Easter. This meant that Cathay Pacific would not allow her to travel and offered a full refund. A bit later Philippines airlines cancelled their flight. Again full refund on offer. We checked on the British Airways website and saw that due to the cancellations we could ask for a full refund or change the flight. However, since it was booked on Expedia.ie — we needed to get in touch with Expedia. At around the same time the US implements travel restrictions on travel to Europe. So we became one of thousands of customers trying to change our plans.
At first Expedia had been asking people to wait until 2 weeks before departure to get in touch for changes and refunds. When the US travel restrictions hit. This became 72 hours. So even if we knew already in February. And all the airlines we had booked with already allowed for changes/refunds. We had to wait until 72 hours before the intended start of travel. Now it’s worth mentioning here that Expedia is one of the largest online travel agencies in the world. It’s been around since the advent of online travel. They have local sites for all kinds of markets and Ireland is one of those. Now if we had booked on Expedia in the US. We might have had an easier time. Because there Expedia offered up all kinds of ways to cancel/reschedule. Maybe we would not have. For whatever reason, the only way we could cancel the flight was to call Expedia in Ireland.
Now Expedia is just like many others in the travel industry. They outsource their customer care. Have huge service centers based in countries like India and the Philippines. I can just imagine what it must be like to work in those places these days. A constant stream of calls from people. Who had to wait a very long time to get through. We basically started calling about 69 hours before departure. That was around 1 or 2 PM here in Iceland. We got an unlimited call subscription to Ireland on Skype. Which took us a little longer than we expected. Finding usernames and passwords for services you don’t use much. Always a bit tricky. Called the customer service number. We waited for 4 hours. Someone answered but apparently couldn’t hear us. Hung up on us. We tried again. Made sure that we could definitely be heard. Got disconnected as it seems the Irish Expedia phone service is not a 24 hour service. 7 hours of calling and I still remember the music being played.
Following morning my wife starts to call at 7 in the morning. This time around she only had to wait for 3 hours until a very nice customer service representative, most likely based in India, picked up. Everything went very smoothly. He was helpful. Could see that our flights had been cancelled and we could either ask for a refund or change our flights. She requested a full refund and asked for confirmation from Expedia that the phone call had gotten through. She also sympathised with the customer service representative and thanked him for being there during these crazy times. I hope everyone does the same. The customer service people in call centers may be literally risking their lives. We could see that our flight was cancelled via the Expedia app — but never got the customer service survey. Maybe they’ve suspended those for now.
Now we didn’t know how quickly we would get our refund. Expedia doesn’t handle that side of things, so it would be dependent upon British Airways. We expected at least a couple of weeks after Easter. Maybe longer. We got a full refund from British Airways the week after Easter. These are extraordinary times. A full blown crisis. But this was excellent customer service during a crisis from both Expedia and British Airways. It was stressful to wait on the phone. It was stressful to wait for the refund. But if we manage to get back on our feet. Travel resumes and we will be looking for flights again to the Philippines. Which we certainly hope to do soon. We will be looking for flights with British Airways again. This is how you make fans. We hope to be flying with you soon.