UGH!!! GDS Help Desks

Do you ever feel like you go round and round with help desks? Why is it that we, the "just the travel agent" feels as though we need to recommend to these people how to do their job. Their lack of common sense and customer service skills, or rather lack there of, never ceases to amaze me.

So here is my issue.....the last three times that I have booked this particular Hampton Inn through my airline reservation system (Apollo/Galileo), I have only been able to confirm a smoking room type for the government rate and each and every single time I call the hotel direct to see if they can confirm a non-smoking room for my client instead, they say, "OH, (with a cheerful voice) you already have a non-smoking room confirmed!!". OK, that's great, but what a waste of time and how is this happening?

Well, obviously the hotel has not a clue, so, I call "the experts" at the GDS help desk. Ok, so the emphasis here is on "experts" which I say "tongue in cheek". The gal at the "expert GDS Help desk" tells me I need to contact "MY" help desk and my ole travel agent pea brain says, but Hampton is the one who is feeding the information to "my" help desk. The folks at "my" help desk don't set there and type the information into "my" system manually. The information which I am reading from has been "fed" into my GDS system, based on the information which was fed to us from Hampton hotels, based on the information which was fed to Hampton Hotels directly from someone in the hotel who is providing the information, soooooo, it would seem to me that the hotel should be contacted by the ones who are being fed the information, not me, the travel agent peon!! Puleez, it shouldn't take rocket science for these "help" desks to know that all they need to do is contact the hotel direct and speak with the person who "feeds" this information to the end user, which is ME and, regardless of what they say, this is not MY responsibility to have this fixed!! So, next time I make a reservation for this particular Hampton Inn, we'll see if they got it fixed!! You see, according to the hotel, they only have four smoking rooms, so why is it so difficult to input the correct information. Smoking should not even be in their vocabulary.

It's just another day in my travel agent life. I get so sick and tired of suggesting to these people how they should do their jobs. If they're really experts, I just don't understand why I have to think for them!! The pathetic part is that none of these phone calls had been outsourced which is another huge pet peeve of mine. Ah, but that's in yet a different post.