Travel agents are no strangers to handling customer complaints but every now and then they receive grievances so unusual that they seem almost unbelievable.
From impossible travel requests to jaw-dropping misunderstandings, these stories prove that no question is too strange in the world of travel planning.
Travel News turned to the OpenJaw (Facebook) community, asking agents to share the most bizarre complaints they've ever received.
Here is a round-up of some of the most unusual complaints:
- “You didn’t warn me when going to Spain that everyone spoke Spanish.”
- “How much is the train ticket from Durban to Mauritius?”
- “Please find me a destination to travel to that doesn’t have stray cats.”
- “I asked the client whether they'd require flights from Johannesburg to Durban for the MSC Cruise and she asked why she can't board the cruise in Joburg.’’
- Not a travel agent, but in her years as cabin crew: The client asked the pilot to “turn off the engines; they are too noisy.”
- “They allowed kids on my business-class flight... I request a full refund.”
- “My garden view room does not have a sea view!”
- “I want a refund for my stockings because they got dirty walking on the carpet.”
- “You didn’t tell me there were large lizards in Malaysia!”
- “Client phoning from Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport inside the lift: ‘Hi, which button must I press to get to departures?’”
- “I am just driving into New York. I will send you my location to tell me where I can park.”
- “Ensure we see lions on our game drive and arrange ahead of the drive, as we did not see any lions on our previous game drive. Or else we want a refund.”
- “Client booking well in advance wanted a guarantee that it would be snowing in Paris on Christmas Day before making payment.”
- “British passport holders who returned from Mauritius wrote to me and asked why I hadn't told them that they'd burn badly if they lay in the sun too long.”
- “I had a client who missed her domestic flight in India. She called me and told me why I didn't check up on them to see if they were on the plane. Now, because I didn't call the airline as well to check if they boarded, it is my fault and she wants me to pay her back.”
