By Eric Hrubant, Founder & CEO of CIRE Travel
The announcement came after everyone was already seated: the flight home had been canceled.
After a long business trip, she only wanted one thing: to sleep in her own bed. After the announcement, she turned on her phone to let her husband know she wouldn’t be home that night and discovered that someone else had already called her. A voicemail from her CIRE advisor was waiting. One of the last seats on the last flight to Boston had been secured with a car service reserved for the two-hour drive home to Maine. A backup flight to Portland was also being held for the next morning with a hotel reservation for the night on standby. All she had to do was tell us which option she preferred.
Then there was the couple flying to Bali for their honeymoon. They were somewhere over the Pacific when a storm flooded their hotel. They knew nothing about it. By the time they landed, however, another hotel had been arranged at the same cost, their room had been upgraded from four stars to five, and their transportation had been reorganized. A driver met them at the airport with a personal note explaining what had happened and took them directly to their new accommodation. Their honeymoon continued without incident.
Not every rescue involves a natural disaster or airline meltdown. One morning, a honeymoon couple client hadn’t checked in for their 8:30 a.m. flight to Cancun. They had slept through three alarms. When they finally woke up at 9:00 a.m., they called us, understandably panicked. We were already looking at solutions. By 9:30 a.m., we had them booked on a later flight, their return tickets had been protected, a credit had been secured for the unused outbound flight, and their airport transfer had been rescheduled. Sometimes we navigate major international emergencies. Sometimes we save a honeymoon from three unreliable alarm clocks.“Thank God for you guys because if I had to take care of all of this myself this morning I would probably cry,” said the bride.
The Value of Having Someone in Your Corner
These stories are about what happens when another person is paying attention. Someone notices that you have not checked in. Someone starts working on the problem before you know it exists. Someone understands that after a long trip, getting home as soon as possible matters more than anything else. Travel is filled with preferences, too many decisions, unexpected complications, and moments when someone simply needs to know what to do next. Technology gives us extraordinary tools. Actual people bring judgment, ingenuity, empathy, and the willingness to take responsibility for what happens next.
Barbra Streisand said it best: “People who need people are the luckiest people in the world.”
People who travel with CIRE may be among the luckiest of all.
CIRE Travel is a full-service travel agency headquartered in New York, NY, with offices in Kennebunkport, ME, Washington, DC, Boston, MA, Atlanta, GA, Los Angeles, CA, and Philadelphia, PA. Our expert corporate travel planners, honeymoon travel agents, and luxury travel planners support clients across the country and around the world.
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