Amidst the Coronavirus outbreak, the travel industry as a whole has faced many complications and hardships. With some travel management companies, hotels and airlines, letting go of thousands of employees leaving many travelers confused and at times – helpless.
But, if there can be any silver lining that comes out of this crisis, it is that many companies and travelers can absolutely attest to the value of a travel agency. As a company, World Travel, Inc. has faced no disruption of service and no layoffs, differentiating us from other travel management companies. We have made it our top priority to step up and assist our clients during this time and will continue to be there to support them during and after the crisis.
Over the past few weeks, many of our client’s travelers have been impacted by borders closing, countries restricting travel, airlines cancelling flights and meetings being postponed, but through it all, we have been there to assist along the way.
Supporting and Educating our Clients
Through it all, we are dedicated to keeping our clients informed about the ever-changing travel landscape. We send out weekly COVID-19 communications and provide useful information in our weekly newsletters. Our Account Managers have been supporting our clients daily, providing insight and advice to help them alleviate the pains they are feeling with travel restrictions and the hardships the virus has placed on their programs.
Leveraging our Wholly Owned After-Hours
One of the biggest differentiators World Travel offers our clients is access to our wholly owned after-hours support. When our customers were faced with travel challenges, they knew they didn’t have to wait in long lines at the airport, or sit on hold for hours to get home, our agents were there to support them! This consistent service ensures our customers receive the best service, quickly and consistently!
Continuing Our Technology Improvements
Although these times are uncertain, World Travel continues to provide our clients with industry-leading travel technology. During this crisis, our clients have come to us requesting many custom reports to help them analyze their travel program as a whole before the outbreak and continue to assess how things change during and after the pandemic to help them drive their program in the future. Our Account Managers have been working with our clients to provide both standard and customized reports tailored to their individual needs.
Helping our University Clients
World Travel is the partner of choice for many of the nation’s leading Universities, and during this crisis have worked to organize emergency evacuations to get students and faculty back home safety. With little time to prepare, and much less time to get foreign students’ home before travel restrictions went into place, our teams rallied together to find solutions to help them get home to their families safely.
Assisting our Leisure Travelers
Vacations should be relaxing, but as borders closed and flights were cancelled many of our vacationers were scrambling to get home or figure out what to do with their upcoming trips. Our advisors were able to assist our clients with revised itineraries to get them home when needed or securing all deposits and re-booking trips for future dates.
Managing Large Meetings
World Travel, Inc. helps our clients plan meetings of all sizes, and unfortunately, COVID-19 happened when the meetings and events industry was really starting up for 2020. Our clients had many large meetings planned that were going to be impacted by travel restrictions and lock-downs. Our event planners took action and were able to proactively assist our clients with postponing their events. We helped our clients with all of their event needs from attendee notifications and travel changes to vendor negotiations, hotel contracting, and refund requests.
What will happen in the future, no one can say for certain, but World Travel, Inc. is prepared to support our clients 24/7/365 and will continue to collaborate with our preferred suppliers until this outbreak has been contained and managed. In order to prepare for additional complications with traveling, World Travel, Inc. have been helping our clients build a plan to help better prepare for the future and ensure their travel programs are updated and enhanced to deal with situations such as these. As we implement solutions to solving current problems, we are taking the opportunity to develop new ways of supporting our clients in the future. We remain united and dedicated to our primary duty – supporting our clients. While we wait for things to return to normal, we encourage you all to be healthy, be home, and know that when your travel resumes. We will be here to help!
Kudos from our Clients
Thank you, World Travel, Inc. After learning our vacation would have to be cancelled, we called in and our advisor methodically went through cancellations for my family. She made calls as she went along, got us all the information we needed to know about any future value on our tickets, was friendly, calm and truly a pleasure to speak with. AND, all this at a time of uncertainty for all. I told her how much I appreciated her this morning. She’s a star in my eyes. This call made my day.
The World Travel team is always so professional and helpful, but during this time they have went above and beyond! During my recent cancellation due to our travel restrictions, the staff were able to help with the cancellation and to ensure that I received the voucher for future travel.