Traveling through a new Adventure as a Travel Agent

Being a travel agent

The last few days have been hard in the travel agency space. I have my very first group of eight rooms and there has been issue after issue after issue. Some being my issue but mostly items out of my control. I have had to call Royal Caribbean over and over again. It has not been very fun, and my hourly pay has been crashing down.

The trouble started from it being my first group cruise. I have been able to pull from some experience, but nothing prepared me for ten rooms at the same time with 20 moving parts, 20 different personalities, 20 different levels of procrastination. It has been a wild time. Traveling tends to bring stress in a lot of people and with my own tools failing I have been looked at as the issue. Which is really unfortunate with how hard I have worked to solve every problem and make this trip the best I can. Right now, it looks like I am not competent. Which has been disheartening. I have tried to push through it but every time I pass one obstacle, three more show up.

The first item to figure out is how to get the group rate along with the guaranteed interior rate for the cheapest cruise possible. This takes extra effort, but it is possible to fill out a group, receive a block of eight rooms, then INDIVIDUALLY book all the guaranteed interiors and add them to the group once deposits are paid. Once everything is completed, you drop the unused, more expensive rooms. This wasn’t known to me at first and it was back and forth for several days on how to make it happen.

The night owls have been pushing my job well into the night and I have gotten up out of bed to secure pricing each time. The first night where all the motion happened was around 10 o clock and right when I was going to fly through the bookings, the website went down for maintenance. This made me have to call Royal Caribbean and book ten rooms over the phone which was its own challenge. Unfortunately, I was paired with a representative that had some issues with finding the proper sailing, spelling the names correctly and it was well over an hour long where I had to spell every name and tell them every birthday, phone number, and email. Just to have to re-do it the next day.

The next set of issues were roommate switches and room switches to different categories of staterooms. Some of these switches earned me extra commission but wow, it wasn’t easy. It has been a busy few days….

Now, we have made it into the world of credit card payments. What I usually do is just call the clients to get card information, and this has worked. Every time. I wanted to be more professional by having a credit card portal. Where I can capture cards, authorize the usage, and pay the bill. It looks better than calling a random person I believe. It has worked to varying success. There have been card declines, invalid cards and just a whole bunch of errors even Royal LOCKING a reservation when I tried to pay the bill. Only working for a select few.

We are still in the deposit phase…. I have had several easy trips that I have planned for an easy extra income. This group has been a bit different. A perfect combination of new travel agent, and Royal Caribbean software being unreliable. After this week, there won’t be much to do until securing final payments before the cruise. I hope. As this has been the most work I have done for any vacation. Add that on top of my moving stress, end of the semester of college, and typical life issues. It has been a rough few weeks.

Once we realized they were putting their card information wrong, everything got much smoother. We were able to fly through the rest of the deposits without any issue. One of the coolest additions I have made to the travel agent side is to be able to send automated emails to remind, inform, or take credit card payments. It has been a hard time trying to wrestle down the whole group, but I have pushed through it and we are almost to the home stretch. 14 rooms booked. It took time. I have been playing around with other ideas to make more income. Chasing two rabbits. Most likely you will catch none. In my life this has been common. I just haven’t been able to put my focus completely on a task. My mind runs and runs, wanting different things, craving higher potential elsewhere. I have been doing good at the travel agent side. I figured things out and will continue to figure things out. My first BIG cruise booking and I am almost through it.