Chris Brown is the Lanky Git

When I first started out in travel I worked in various call centres, selling on a commission only basis. i.e. No salary, so if you didn’t sell anything you didn’t earn anything. Fortunately I had a knack for selling so I was able to make decent money.

Now when you spend all day answering the phone you quickly get to know what a customer’s standard answer or question is going to be and if they are ‘playing the game’, which is ringing around and trying to get you to undercut the last guy in order to save themselves a few quid. This ‘game’ wasn’t something I got into as they were generally wasting my time, after all, usually they would do is ring the next number in their list and get a competitor to undercut you. As all travel agents were selling from the same system we all had pretty much the same base price.

Everyone who has ever worked in a travel call centre will understand where I am coming from here, there are a bunch of requests you get from people looking for holidays that just make you think, why? My favourite of all time has to be the ‘I am looking for a holiday to anywhere…’, so not somewhere hot, not some country specific, just anywhere.  The conversation normally went like this:

Customer: “I am looking for a cheap holiday to anywhere.”

Agent: “Ok, so no where in particular?”

C: “Anywhere, we just fancy a break.”

A: “So are you looking for a beach holiday, ski, cruise… ?”

C: “Anything really, we aren’t that fussy.”

I remember a while back when I was working for Travel Bargains in Woking, we were getting a lot of calls for holidays to Ayia Napa in Cyprus, as it was featured on the TV show , ‘Ayia Napa Uncovered’. I had a great call one day from a girl who wanted to go there, she said that there were two of them and that they wanted to go to Ayia Napa. It wasn’t a bad query to be honest as all I had to do was search for something in her price range. Now those of you that know Cyprus, will know that it has two airports, Paphos and Larnaca, with one being at each end of the Island. Paphos being the furthest from Ayia Napa was the cheapest to fly into. I asked the girl which airport she would like to fly into on Cyprus, to which she responded, that she didn’t want to go to Cyprus she wanted top go to Ayia Napa… she didn’t book anything.

Of course the legend of all enquiries was the people ringing and asking if we had anything for £99 for 1 week to Benidorm, in August. This almost as bad as the ‘I don’t have a budget’ people.

C: “Looking to book a holiday in August, all inclusive, anywhere hot…”

A: “ok sir (tosser), what sort of budget do you have, as this will determine where in Europe I can find for you?”

C: ” I don’t have a budget, you tell me what you’ve got.

A: (making it up) “I have Majorca 3* All Inclusive for £900 per person”

C: “Hmm, well I wasn’t planning on spending more than £500 each, do you anything under £500?”

The conversation was much more strung out than this but you get the idea. There is also the variation of this customer who won’t tell you what their best quote is.

Not such a bad query but the “Anywhere hot” one was always a difficult one in the middle of the summer, equally so was “Anywhere with sunshine“…

Generally though working in a call centre, selling holidays can be very bountiful, as long as you know your product and have some patience for those who aren’t really sure what they want, then you’re onto a winner. Just look at every phone call as a sale, like every visitor to your sunpress driven travel site is a sale

The great thing about being an online agent, as opposed to working in a call centre is that people will book what they want to book rather than what you want to sell them, thus removing the hard work part of selling holidays- let the web do this for you.

Travel