Now, I don’t know where I’m gonna go when the volcano blow (A pretty good customer service story about CIE Tours)
With a trip planned to Paris in another week or so, my husband and I are watching the skies over Europe (especially Iceland) with keen interest. Right now, it looks good, but we’ve been back and forth about whether it’s worse to miss the trip or get stranded in Paris. Now, getting stranded in Paris is not exactly the end of the world, but when you want to get home, you want to get home.
Which is how my cousin Mary Beth feels right about now.
She’s not stranded in Paris, but she’s not exactly in a bad spot, either. She’s in Dublin, having finished up a 9 day tour of the Old Sod. And while she’d naturally like to get home, MB’s experience hasn’t been half-bad.
We were supposed to fly out on the 19th, but no go. Our tour company (CIE Tours) was fantastic. They took us all to the airport to rebook then arranged for us to go to a very nice hotel on the south side of Dublin (Stillorgan Park Hotel…4 star). The also "comped’ us the first night and negotiated with the hotel to give us their (CIE’S) rate of 85 euro including breakfast per night…Anyway, the company did right by us and I would recommend them highly. Other tour companies just dropped their customers at the airport and fled. Aer Lingus (and the other airlines) have refused to put any of the stranded travelers up.
Let’s take a look at what CIE Tours did for themselves here:
- Built enormous good will with the folks on the tour
- Kicked off some positive word-of-mouth advertising
- Had to spend very little (I don’t know how many tours CIE had going – they’re definitely a biggy on the Irish scene – or whether MB’s tour got the kid-glove treatment because it was a high end one, but if you just take this one bus with, I’m guessing about 40 people/2 = 20 rooms at 85 Euros a night, plus the cost of ferrying folks to the airport, then this is not very much money to put toward good-will and word-of-mouth.)
As for Aer Lingus, it sounds like what they’re doing is what pretty much every other airline is doing for those stranded: not much. And, realistically, other than providing clear, up to date information, this is what I’d expect. Nice if they want to throw some cots up, and hand out cookies and bottled water every once in a while, but mostly it’s the info updates that are most needed – even when there’s no real news to report, people tend to be hungry for any crumb. (I was stranded in Orlando on 9/11, so I do know the feeling.)
- Anyway, I did look at the Aer Lingus web site, and – other than a link to some info on one specific rescheduled flight from Boston to Dublin, 5 days overdue, there was no ‘volcano strandee’ information section that I could readily find. Bad form! (Just to see how another airline handled this, Air France had a direct link on its US home page “Air France flights to resume”, that you could click through to find news on, even though the click through didn’t have much more information other than confirming the a normal schedule was being resumed.)
- As for the tour operators who just dumped their passengers off at Dublin Airport and cut and run, well… Sounds like they could have done a bit better. Maybe not to the tune of comping everyone for their first hotel night, but they could have run some interference – and made some loyal customers in the bargain.
- In truth, I wouldn’t have been worried about my cousin’s ability to fend for herself quite nicely if she had been dumped off. She’s an experienced, sophisticated traveler and, although this was her first trip to Ireland, she might have been mildly annoyed, but non-plussed, if she had to arrange her own hotel room and do her own negotiating.
- But I have been to Ireland often enough to know that a lot of the people on those tours are by no means frequent flyers. I’ve seen plenty of tour buses where the folks are quite elderly and on a ‘trip of a lifetime’ back “home” to a place where most of them have never been, but where their parents or grandparents hailed from. I can imagine it would be somewhat bewildering for someone elderly, without a lot of overseas travel experience, to cope with the situation. I can just picture them standing in Dublin Airport, wearing their new “Aran Isles” sweaters and watch-plaid scally caps, surrounded by their suitcases and all those stuffed Blarney Woolen Mills shopping bags (souvenirs for the kids and grandkids), trying to figure out where to go. Let’s face it, even trying to figure out how to use a “foreign” phone booth to make a call is confusing, even if you do have third cousin Paddy’s phone number.
- Anyway, it looks like Mary Beth is making the most of her “bonus days” in Dublin, and will be back in the States by end of week, with high praise for CIE. Which she will be generously voicing, I’m quite sure, among her family, friends, and neighbors, many of whom – as Irish Americans – are a natural target market for CIE.
- I’m betting that CIE winds up with some direct business because of the fine way they handled the volcano problem for at least one bus-load of weary travelers.
Test-a-roon-y
OK – On Sunday morning, I awoke to find out that my laptop had decided it was time to head to the glue factory.
RIP, my trusty steed. Two years, two months, two weeks. For a laptop that gets the workout mine does, well…. this was to be expected.
Still, it was frustrating.
Broken I/O. Grayed-out everything. Slow-baby performance. Terrible start-up overhead.
Simply the worst.
So, it was off to Best Buy, where the service – in my humble experience – is simply the best. Kudos to Dan from Geek Squad for all of his good-humored help
Fortunately, having heard my nag wheezing and snuffling for the last few weeks, I had finally subscribed to an online update – Carbonite, mostly because they’re a home-town honey: based in Boston.
So, rather than watch every second of the health reform vote, I went laptop shopping. And now, while my files are restored. (Chug, chug, chug.)And as I try to figure out the differences between Vista – which I actually liked – and Windows 7, I thought I’d try a Pink Slip post.
Here we go.
