Hungarian Ribbon Dancers, Mammoth Skin Sliders and Safari Portal’s New ‘Flight Change’ Notifications
Picture this - you’ve worked hard to put together an amazing trip for a new client (Rose and Peter). You’ve dealt with their enquiry with the utmost care, their requirements were complex, but you nailed it with a carefully thought through itinerary presented beautifully. All the services have been booked, you’ve noted and shared all their individual requests, organized a series of special touches for them along the way, talked through their packing requirements, visas etc.
Finally, their trip of a lifetime is beginning, they’ll be off in 24 hrs to begin their adventure.
At 0800 the morning after their flight takes off you get a call from Peter, their connecting flight in Dubai has suddenly been canceled. They landed into Dubai airport oblivious of the issue and had a nasty surprise on arrival. Now, you didn’t actually book their international flights, nonetheless you’re providing a high end, hand held service, plus you need to re-organise their itinerary and there are some issues…
We all know these types of trips, once one thing goes awry it seems that the knock on effects everything else and it can be hard to pull it back. But are they really a perfect storm of issues, or could all the ensuing mishaps have been avoided if that first bump never happened?
This is where negative memory bias comes into play. Way back when we were hunter gatherers and life was simple, all we had to worry about was staying alive. So, in our uncomplicated (sigh, if only things were so straightforward now) lives the main concerns we had were predators and where the next meal came from.
Photo from Getty.
So now picture this - you’re a hungry, pre-neolithic human trying to provide for your family (we can all empathize here) and there’s been a bugger of a drought, animals are scarce and things are getting a little dicey. Suddenly the first burst of rain comes, the grass has turned green and water holes are filling. Huzzah, at last! You grab your newly sewn loin cloth, favourite spear, and your latest mammoth skin sliders and roll back the cave door, smile on your face and a spring in your tread. But as you take your first step out into the sun and onto the newly watered landscape, you slip into the mud.
Damn it. New loin cloth ruined, mammoth sliders are a mess and as you try to right yourself your whole body now tense, you lose your footing again and land flat on your face. All you want to do is go back inside and roll that stone back across the doorway and pretend like the day never happened - but you can’t, you're starving and nearly about ready to chew off your own arm.
So off you go, but you spend the rest of the day looking at your feet - teetering on every step. You’re so preoccupied with making sure that what just happened doesn’t happen again that you become as uncoordinated as a baby gazelle on a frozen lake and everything seems to go wrong. You miss any animals out there, because your usual stealth-like hunter grace has been replaced with movement more akin to a pregnant rhino, and everything can hear you coming from several miles away.
You return home, lucky to be alive, miserable and empty handed. You were so busy trying to keep yourself on your feet that you missed the sunshine, green pastures, abundant berries you could have picked, and fish in the newly flowing stream that you could have speared. And now, forever more, you will always remember that day because your survival instinct kicks in and tells you - whatever you do, do NOT be an idiot and slip in the mud. We are hard wired to change rhythm when things go wrong, it’s our innate will to live kicking in and despite evolution, and what Taylor Swift might tell you, there are some things that just can’t be shaken off.
What has this got to do with travel? I hear your inner voice say… let’s go back to Peter and Rose, rewind to them on their flight to Dubai, sipping champagne in first class, catching up on the latest movies and blissfully ignorant to the fact that their connecting flight from Dubai to Bali has been canceled.
You, on the other hand, as their top notch, best in class, travel agent, are busy doing what you do best because you got an alert on your phone to tell you that Rose and Peter’s flight was a goner and they were about to be left high and dry.
Within 2 hrs (slightly annoying as you’re supposed to be in bed right now, but such is the life of a travel professional) you’ve booked them a night at the One & Only Royal Mirage, you’ve managed to liaise with their flight agent to organise a new flight option for them and you’ve contacted the team in Bali to re-organize their trip to fit the new dates. There have had to be some small tweaks to the order of things, but you’ve booked them tickets to Cirque du Soleil during their stopover in Dubai as a peace offering which you hope will make good on the issues.
Photo from the Cirque de Soleil website www.cirquedesoleil.com
Rose and Peter now arrive to an email from you outlining what has happened and what you have done to resolve it. Slightly perturbed of course, they can’t help to be impressed, they know the flight cancellation wasn’t your fault and you went above and beyond to piece things back together again. Plus it turns out that Peter, before he became an investment banker, had always dreamed of joining the circus to become a trapeze artist so the Cirque du Soleil tickets are a total winner.
You have just won yourself ‘lifers’ - Rose and Peter will never travel with anyone else again, or dare to book anything direct. Their time is too precious to have to deal with things when they go wrong.
They also cannot stop telling all their friends about the Hungarian ribbon dancer that they saw whilst on a stopover in Dubai… and so the story is told again and again and again and again. And you get yourself six incredible referrals all thanks to Safari Portal’s new flight notifications and an undeniably talented and stunningly beautiful rhythmic gymnast called Reka. Boom.
To find out more about our latest feature release, contact a member of our team, or request a demo here.