Leadership By Numbers

Category Management
Recently, I've had the opportunity to reserve some international flights, to Nairobi. The prices ranged between $2,500 and $1,800 when we checked the usual on-line resources, or specialty travel agents.

I've heard of Mobissimo, but because my travels are mostly North America, I hadn't tried them before. My mistake. Mobissimo is an aggregator of various ticket companies (e.g., cheaptickets.com, expedia.com, etc.) and just spits out a list over several minutes, creating a tally of possible flight combinations, numbering the count for connecting flights, and giving the price.

Mobissimo took me to EBooker.com, a UK firm, which gave the lowest price. Unfortunately, I needed four tickets, and the web interface did not have the means to select four-at-a-time. I was stuck. EBooker had the flight and price, but I needed to book four seats, and didn't want to find that only a few were available, after booking and committing one or two seats.

I called them up.

Here's where everything turned around, because I actually got to talk to a real person, Denise M., who was very patient. We went through the flight plan (DC, to Boston, to Heathrow, to Nairobi, and then back) with each carrier and their flight number. She recorded all the passenger names, checked the times, and then did something that I find extraordinary. She sent an E-mail and waited for me to receive it, read it, check it, and send a reply. It couldn't have been a more pleasant exchange. I was calling from Washington, DC, to a UK company, who had their reservation calls handled in India, for flights to Africa.

Highly recommended.