I was supposed to leave Ottawa on Saturday to London, but thanks to a tremendous snowstorm, it didn’t really happen until mid-Sunday (and even then it caused a domino effect of problems and troubles due to tight scheduling and such). I was doing this for work and our corporate travel is actually dealt with through a large credit card company’s travel service (we’ll call them TinCan Travel).
TinCan actually offers an emergency travel number to call when things go wrong or you need to make changes while you travel (and in the past I have used this service and it has worked very well). Last weekend was a “perfect storm” for this system to fail miserably.
- Two snowstorms in a row had transpired in successive days
- It was the start of March Break in Ontario, and thus one of the busiest travel days
- It was the weekend, and most likely they have a lower staffing at that time
These points and others meant we never were able to connect into the emergency response number. We stayed on the phone for over 4 hours one time and almost 3 hours the Sunday morning, we were put on hold and given the repeating message about how important our call is to them.
Am I unhappy with this? Yes, but I also realized why this was happening. We eventually had to clean up the travel mess ourselves and at the end of it we only had to pay one penalty, so we did ok. We never tried to call TinCan’s emergency help line the rest of the week.
This morning I got an e-mail asking for my opinion on how well TinCan’s travel service worked. Pardon? I was going to let sleeping dogs lie, I would tell the story of our travel debacle as a joke at parties were everyone would laugh and that was where it was going to stay, however, if someone asks my opinion, I feel obliged to give it (especially when I am really miffed).
My main complaint was, “Don’t tell me you are going to answer my call when you neither have the resources or the time to do it”, change your message to say, “We are incredibly busy due to the storm (which they did), please make your own arrangements if possible (which they didn’t)”, and for the sake of all involved don’t ask me what my opinion is.
I filled in the questionnaire in an honest, but hopefully not rude manner, and maybe TinCan will learn from this, but what would they learn? Don’t ask me my opinion? When snowstorms strike put more people on your Emerg Call In Line? Who knows?
Another really good example of making sure you have an emergency financial plan.
