As I mentioned in a recent post, I was quite irritated by the "service" I received from a local travel agent. I was trying to book a multi-destination trip (babymoon) for us, and enlisted his help, which ended up being a fairly pointless endeavor. Why?
In the end, he quoted me US $6,266 for a trip that is sub-par to what I just booked myself for US $2,490. Ummmm yeah that is a US $3,776 difference, not to mention the waste of time in even dealing with him!
Let it also be known that my booking includes very nice hotels in prime areas. His didn't. Unbelievable.
As an aside - I got a smoking good deal on our multidestination flight with TAM, even better than what was quoted to me on Kayak.com. All I did was phone TAM and book it that way. Just FYI.
It sometimes seems to me as though "sales people" be it travel agents, real estate agents, retail shop girls, etc. take a very different approach to their job than what I am used to back home. Sales tactics back home: listen to the customer and find out their needs, then recommend products. Here I don't see much regard for what I as a customer want. If I don't know what I want, that's one thing. But here are some examples of such situations I have found irritating over the past year:
- The travel agent mentioned above - instead of looking into any of the 10 or so small, private, spa-like boutique hotels we requested and had already researched and provide us with rates, took it upon himself to only give us one rate - and choose a huge chain hotel for us. In other words, the exact opposite of what we were looking for. When I asked why, he said because it was not as far from the airport as the hotels we'd chosen. We were well aware of this fact when we requested the hotels - rather than simply asking us, he simply assumed. And paid no attention whatsoever to the type and calibre of hotels we had originally requested.
- While looking for an apartment, the real estate agent takes us to apartment after apartment with neither outside space/veranda nor view (we specifically requested that we wanted at least one or the other). When after several places like this I finally commented on this to him, he looked at me incredulously and said "but this place is great, it has 4 parking spaces." I informed him that we did not have a car.
- While shopping for appliances there was an attempt to talk me into buying a refrigerator I did not want, with features I found useless...
- Anytime I go into a clothing store, hideous clothing items are offered to me that are completely opposite of what I am looking at/wearing. Like I am talking lime green sports bras, and oh my favorite! Crop tops. I am in my third trimester, folks...
I don't find that a lot of sales people take the time to read the customer, do the homework, or anticipate needs. It honestly feels like they are just trying to get rid of whatever inventory is getting old, whichever hotel rooms offer the highest commission for them, etc... but maybe I am wrong!
Can anyone comment on how sales people are trained here in Brazil? What are some of the fundamentals? How do they differ from North America? Are there some philosophies?
I completely agree...especially regarding the apartment locating services. We tried two different agencies and neither one could show us anything we wanted - amazing!! I don't know how many places we looked at that we asked ourselves, "why are we even here, this is nothing like what we want!" Finally, we ditched the services and lived in an apartment/hotel for a month and found our perfect place all by oursleves...
Posted by: caroline.n | March 08, 2009 at 01:08 PM
The behavior sounds very familiar, I think it must be a world trend more than a Brazil thing...
We had the exact same issue with a real estate agent in Florida, showing us all kinds of houses she knew it wasn't at all what we were looking for...
There was a special 20/20 report on some dental clinics in the US under investigation by the Justice Department for performing unnecessary procedures on children.
I also had an experience with a travel agent from Boston trying to push hotels in Europe that weren't at all what we were looking for, very much the opposite of what we had specified. We later found out that they got bigger commissions from the hotels they were trying to push on to us.
I recently had another bad experience at the local Lincoln dealership, but I won't even go there...car sales people...
I think it is the constant growing pressure for increased profits, it must be a global thing.
I guess we just have to be aggressive into putting our foot down and demanding the services we want/need or going somewhere else.
You are certainly on the right track.
Posted by: Ray Adkins | March 08, 2009 at 03:53 PM
Caroline - glad you found something!
Ray - Good to know it's not just here!
Posted by: Daily Rio Life | March 09, 2009 at 05:32 PM