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China trip day 1: Beijing-ga!

holly — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 20:27:25 +0000

After what felt like the slowest movie marathon in history (why oh why can’t I sleep on planes? And why oh why did they actually make Bad Teacher? Has Hollywood run out of goos scripts entirely?), I finally touched down in Beijing, China. Home of the 2008 Olympic Games, at least a couple of pandas, and 20 million people. That’s almost the entire population of Canada squeezed into a space the size of greater Vancouver. I was, as I’m sure the 9 other people travelling with me were as well, braced for a culture shock. Sure, I’d been to Asia before, but everyone I talked to said that everywhere paled in comparison to mainland China, warning that it’s so crazy/loud/overcrowded/aggressive/smelly/overwhelming/etc. Admittedly my first impression was at night, so I couldn’t really make out the details, but on the drive from the airport to the hotel, it just looked like a medium sized city. Pretty and pedestrian, with wide tree-lined boulevards. Traffic was bad, and the cars and buses swerved and changed lanes at will, barely avoiding collision, but all the buildings were no more than 20 storys and not all squished together like they are in Hong Kong. Huh? Beijing is supposed to be super crowded, but yet it looks like Vancouver, just outside the downtown core? Where am I? And more importantly, where are all the people?

Still puzzling over this, we were delivered to the Crown Plaza Beijing Wangfujing, a really nice, modern hotel. The only sign in my large, fantastically generic hotel room that I was in China at all were the gas masks in the red canisters in the closet. The packaging was so innocuous, though, that one of the other agents thought they were containers of tea! Note for future travellers, please do not try to steep and drink the gas masks. Horribly metallic flavour. Kidding. After a few minutes to freshen up, we met up and hit the streets. Wangfujing, the street our hotel fronted onto, is one of the main shopping streets in the city, and was lit up with giant jumbotron billboards, giving the whole area a welcoming, festive vibe designed to entice visitors to part with their hard-earned cash. And judging by the giant 8 level mega malls there, they do pretty well. Half a block away, just as we stopped to take pics of a cathedral, loud Chinese pop music started playing (not what one would normally expect at Catholic Mass, but a definate bonus), complete with live singing on the front steps, and a big crowd of people materialized in the plaza and all started line dancing. It was a Chinese flash mob! Or maybe it was a normal Tuesday night in Beijing, because the participants spanned all ages, and everyone knew the routine. Whatever it was, it was awesome, and two hours later when we were walking back to the hotel, they were still dancing.

Then to the Donghuaman Night Market, just one block farther down. Otherwise known as snack street, this the best place in town to get something roasted on a stick, from the classic chicken, pork, tofu, to the exotic beetle larvae, squid, scorpion and snake. Yum. There are hundreds of stalls lining one side of the street, brightly lit with a line of red lanterns. On the upside, for vending carts, they are clean and the food was good quality. On the downside, every stall sells exactly the same stuff, so after the first ten feet you really don’t need to continue exploring, as you’ve seen it all by now. Like most tourists, we took photos of the sheer grossness and spectacle of it all, squealed, giggled, bought nothing and moved on. They must do a ton of business to be able to support that many stalls, but on a sub-zero November night, there wasn’t a big demand for snake on a stick. Plus, I can’t get that home though customs.

Damn it was cold here. For years I’ve been telling clients that Beijing’s weather is about the same as Vancouver’s but with more sun. As an approximation, it works, but when we were there, it was colder. By quite a bit. Minus 5 with a really strong windchill that made your eyes water and you sprint for the hotel screaming for the weather Gods to take pity on us jet-lagged Canadians. Honestly, that temperature is probobly what kept me up until 930pm, China time, after having been up for nearly 36 hours straight. It helped me get into the local rhythm, but that didn’t make it any more enjoyable, and after a hot bath I collapsed into bed, cocooned up into my comforter and fell into a deep sleep.

WTF – The airline lost my client!

holly — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 00:45:51 +0000

Let’s file this one into the “smack your head in amazement of their stupidity” file. And I stress, I am not making this up. If I was making it up it would involve a rare species of bird and a police chase. This, on the other hand, is just stupid.

An airline (who shall remain nameless to avoid a lawsuit) actually managed to loose one of my clients.

Yep, as in “no we have no idea where he currently is, but we know he’s on a plane going… somewhere”. That’s actually pretty close to the exact words the agent said to me. At this point I’m staring at my phone in complete disbelief. You’re a freaking airline, moving thousands of people every day and with an incredibly sophisticated computer system, but yet you have no idea what plane you put my client on? You have got to be kidding me.

The situation was this: my client showed up at the airport in Cordoba, Argentina, only to be notified that his flight had been rescheduled and he’d miss all his connections, so he been rerouted. Instead of the planned route Cordoba to Santiago to Mexico City to Vancouver, he was now going Cordoba to Santiago to Los Angeles to Houston to Vancouver. Nice, eh? Ooh, surprise, you’re no longer even touching down in an entire country (where he had been supposed to spend the night and had a hotel reservation) and we’re sending you all over the Americas just for the hell of it. But because all these changes were made right at the check-in counter at the airport, his tickets were issued and he was on a plane even before the airline’s computer systems had time to catch up with the changes.

Luckily he had called his wife, who had called me, to notify her of his new schedule, so we (the important people) knew where he was at least supposed to be, even if the airline didn’t. I can’t even begin to imagine what it would have been like had his poor wife not known where he was and I wouldn’t have been able to give her any answers. I’ve had upset clients before, but she would have taken the gold medal for having the best reason to freak out. But alas, all was calm. Just dumbfounded.

On the upside, he arrived right on time and everything turned out great, but I just can’t help but wonder that if the airline could spend hours not knowing where a passenger is, what do they do to luggage? “Oh, I’m sorry, your bag had an emergency rerouting to…somewhere. You may get it back, but we really have no idea at this point”.

And get this: regular passengers out of Cordoba told my client that this wasn’t unusual. It’s like airplane roulette, you have a 50% chance of landing close to where you want, but nothing is guaranteed! Needless to say, next passenger I have going anywhere close to Cordoba, I’m monitoring their progress every step of the way so that even if the airline looses them, I don’t!

The Importance of Travel Agents

holly — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 01:06:33 +0000

Welcome to the internet age. You can now buy a condo, meet your future spouse, learn how to hotwire a car, blog incessantly about your travels, and probably save the world all while still in your pajamas and happy bunny toe socks. You can also book your next vacation all by yourself. But just because you can, should you? Despite having the universe at your fingertips, there is still reason to go to your local Travel Agent and get them to do the work for you.

I’m not just saying this because I am one (okay, that’s a teensy part of it), but Travel Agents are still important assets. We really do have a wealth of information that you’re never going to find online – we talk about popular destinations on a daily basis and/or have probably been there (most tourism offices go to great lengths to get agents to visit so they can better sell their destination). Even if we haven’t visited ourselves, we probably know someone (a coworker/past client) who has been recently and can feed off their feedback. Plus, we sit at computers for a reason, as we have access to a slew of specialized computer programs that can answer most inquiries with just a few clicks or keystrokes. Think of it this way: one day you want to go to Australia, so you hop online and book a return ticket for Sydney leaving next week. Seems perfect, right? But if you didn’t know you needed a Visa to enter Australia (based on Canadian citizenship), the second you got to the immigration counter at Syndey International you’d be denied entry and sent home on the next flight, not getting any of your money refunded.

Agents have your back. More than almost anything, that’s the biggest service we provide. We’re here to support you in booking and planning your dream vacation, but also to help you clean up the mess if something goes wrong. We have lots of industry contacts who we’ve built up relationships with over the years, and if there’s a glitch in your trip, we can go straight to the source and get it sorted out as smoothly as possible. It’s a symbiotic relationship, we support their product, they do their best to help us (and, consequently, you) out in a crisis. Plus, my company, at least, has more than 400 agencies across Canada, so they don’t want to make us mad. We control a nice amount of the selling power across the country, so we wield a little more pursuasive power as the travel companies don’t want to loose our business. I’ve had cases where suppliers will go above and beyond to get a matter sorted out to the client’s satisfaction solely because I was calling on behalf of my company. Online, you get none of this. The classic case is a woman who tried to book herself to London, England and accidentally booked her ticket to London, Ontario (the prices were probably pretty similar!). She was screwed, and there was no one to blame but her own ignorance. No online booking site is going to refund any money just because she didn’t read the fine print. If she had booked with an agent, on the other hand, she would have been going to England correctly in the first place

Then there’s price. Travel agencies understand as well as anyone that in these tough economic times price is the bottom line, and that is why we have a vast network of suppliers – suppliers who do not sell to the public – that offer wholesale “bulk” prices and special contract prices just to us. These are usually better than or at least comparable to anything that could be found online, and without an agent you would have missed out.

Yes, we charge service fees. All agencies do it, and if they say they don’t, that’s because they’ve hidden it in the bill and called it a “tax”. We have to. No business could stay afloat if all they did was give out information all day and not get paid for it. And yes, this adds to the price of your vacation. Think about it, you’re paying for service, booking security and peace of mind. There is a difference between price and value, and what we offer is definitely valuable. When you get to Europe and realize you’d accidentally booked yourself into a hotel with one shared bathroom for all the rooms, or come home from the worst all-inclusive vacation ever and want to file a complaint about it, instead of just sitting and fuming, you could contact us and we could help you get it all sorted out while you sit and fume.

What it all boils down to is this: I love my job. I love creating people’s dreams on a daily basis and sharing all I know with my clients. It’s new and exciting every day, as I don’t know what adventures the day holds. Don’t get me wrong, dealing with distraught clients, stupid questions and annoying airlines isn’t always sunshine and roses, but at the end of the day there’s nothing better then hearing from an excited passenger that I had just sent them on the best vacation they’d ever had. So call your local travel agent and let them put their expertise to work on the best trip you’ve ever had

I wrote a book! What a novel idea.

holly — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:44:01 +0000

Travel agent by day, novelist by night. For years my routine regularly involves going to work just as Holly, but when I get home I put on my cape and morph into my alter-ego Rocket Girl (or Travel Junkie, or Grammatically Correct Girl, whatever, I haven’t come up with a good Super Hero name yet) and curl up with my laptop and hammer away. It’s not going to save the world (unless, of course there’s a massive flood and the world needs to use it as a flotation device), but my efforts have finally bore fruit and my novel is finally complete. You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to say that. I’ve finally written something that passes my anal-retentive “is this good enough to show other people?” test! Insert happy dance here.

It’s an action/mystery work of fiction, but, naturally, there’s a giant amount of travel thrown in. This is me, here. Here’s the gist (I’m not going to spoil it now!): five years ago a group of people witnessed a brutal murder in a Seattle bar, and the killer was never captured. In the interim, the witnesses have dispersed all over the globe, either trying to escape bad memories or through job commitments. When suddenly someone begins unexpectedly hunting down and killing the witnesses, two survivors take it upon themselves to warn the others, but when standard phone calls/e-mails fail, they take to the skies. Thus begins an international cat-and-mouse game that spans the planet from Seattle to Bangkok, Sydney to London, one where motivation, trust and the truth are put to the ultimate test and a missed connection could leave them permanently delayed.

Ooh, that actually sounds pretty good. I’ll have to save that.

Anyhow, I’m so crazy-happy-over the moon that it’s finally done, but now I’m entering a whole new phase of the writing process. The first hurdle is, of course, sucking up that fear that your closest friends and family (or as I like to call them, the “focus group”) are going to read the first draft and hate it (not that they’d actually say that, I do love them for a reason, but still…). Then there’s the next step of “how the hell am I supposed to get this published?” This is the new adventure, the research, the nerve-wracking submitting my manuscript for its blind dates in hoping we’ll find the perfect publisher and soon end up on Chapters shelves everywhere. I’ve had articles published before, but this is a whole different animal, not to mention a hell of a lot more postage to mail. You know that super-excited-but-scared-to-the-point-of-nearly-loosing-bladder-control feeling? I’m there.

I don’t know how this is going to progress, but I can’t wait! Of course, I’ll blog about it every step of the way.

Woo hoo! My book is done!

Have you been there?

holly — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 03:15:08 +0000

Tons of times. I practically forward my mail there.

Yes, but it’s been a while, so some of the attractions weren’t there for me to visit.

Once, on a business trip, but I want to go back and see what I missed.

Not me personally, but one of my coworkers has, and she loved it.

No.

As an agent, responding to ”have you been there?” is daily challenge -on a good day we can hear it as much as Hilary Swank hears “who are you wearing?” on the red carpet. If you’re not prepared to field this one, you’re in the wrong business. The catch is that, for the most part, the people who ask are looking into traveling to the most odd, remote and “how do you pronounce that exactly?” places on the globe.

It always makes me want to laugh (I know, not the most professional thing to do, but really? Do these people think about it before they ask?) when someone comes in asking for flights to Ulaanbataar, Mongolia, and, after getting the air and hotel options they requested, they hit me with “have you been there?” No. But I did see an episode of The Amazing Race that went there, and it looked cold. Being an agent, personal/business travel is a huge part of my job, so I can experience as many destinations as possible, but I’m not that old (er, ”seasoned”) yet. I just haven’t had the time to go everywhere, but I’m working on it. My coworker Shirley, who’s been in the industry forever, really has been practically everywhere, but that’s a whole ’nother story.

From Vancouver, places like London, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Cancun and even Hong Kong are all pretty logical “yep, I’ve been there” places. We have great air connections and send hundreds of people a year. When you come to my desk, I have a “Malaysia” business card holder, framed photo of a Cathay Pacific plane landing at the old Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong, and my filing cabinet covered with postcards. Ask away. I promise that I have been to most of these places, all but the ones in the postcards sent to me from satisfied clients, and those ones I have heard some really great things about.

Honestly, I think it’s the deeper meaning behind this question that interests me. You’re not asking me if I’ve been to Suriname or wherever because you want to know how I spend my free time, you’re asking me because you have no idea what to do there. There was something so enchanting about this destination that compelled you to forgo today’s Days of Our Lives and come down to the agency, but yet you don’t know how you’re going to fill your days once there. Was it just a cool sounding name, so you figured you’d drop that extra three grand you had kicking around on your coffee table and go there? Take a moment and consider what do you like to do on vacation? If you’re a beach bunny, Orlando is going to leave you painfully high and dry (I know Florida is a thin state, but it’s not that thin); or if you have the attention span of a gerbil (like me), an all-inclusive resort designed for nothing but peace and relaxation is going to have you pacing around like a caged lion.

What you really need to do is read my blog on stage 1 of the 3 stages of travel (the Anticipation). But seriously, you need to start the research. I will gladly sell you your trip to Leichtenstein, and I’ll tell you every shred of info I know about it, regardless of whether I’ve been there or not, but to really make your trip yours, you need to plan your days around what you enjoy. No matter how cool the place sounds, if it doesn’t offer a chance to broaden your mind/partake in your favorite hobbies/drink yourself stupid/whatever you want to do, it’s not going to be a truly satisfying vacation. Buy a guidebook. Google it. Take this trip and make it your own. And when you come back, I’ll ask you “Have you been there?” and you’ll have a great answer.