HotmailDon’t bother calling with your travel complaints
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• Be realistic and fair. When sending feedback to a hotel, Lara Weiss of K Hotels suggests directing your note to the general manager of the property and copying the corporate office, if there is one. “Demanding a refund never works,” says Weiss, “because then you just look like you want your money back and don’t really care about the experience.” She says hotels would much rather offer you a free stay to come back and try them again but warns against writing a complaint to a hotel after you have already written a bad review on sites like TripAdvisor. “You will lose all opportunity because you’ve already done the damage.”
• Don’t over-dramatize. Guido Adelfio of Bethesda Travel Center shared the story of a client who fell in the hallway in a French hotel, chipped a tooth and complained when the hotel ignored his request for compensation. “The customer asked for dental bills, medical bills…, a refund of the airfare, a meal allowance, plus a fund for the inconvenience and discomfort,” says Adelfio. “Of course they didn't hear back. They’d asked for the sun, the moon and the stars, far beyond the damage suffered.”
• If you need to, go up the ladder. If you don’t get a response to your well-written complaint letter, it may be because the person reading it doesn’t have the authority to do anything about it. That’s when Kelli Grant, Senior Consumer Reporter at SmartMoney.com, suggests going up the ladder. “There’s a great Web site called Executive Bomb that helps you find executive e-mail addresses for a given company. This way, if your initial complaint falls on deaf ears, you can be sure the next try doesn’t.” And don’t forget that these days many company representatives can also be reached via Twitter, she says. “UPS, Bank of America, JetBlue and Comcast all have people you can reach out to via Twitter to help solve problems. It’s fast help, and usually pretty effective.”
On-the-ground strategies
If it’s really fast help you want, then Tom Murphy suggests learning how to resolve travel complaints in real time. Murphy is the Director of the Human Resiliency Institute at Fordham University in New York and has been helping teach airport and airline employees how to solve customer issues before they become written complaints.
He says the three key tools employees are taught to use — body language, tone of voice and words — can be used by travelers as well.
“If you can, approach a worker with an understanding of the stresses that person has on their job and let them do their job without getting in their face,” he says. “If you use body language and words that have respect, then you have a better chance of getting what you want.”
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That approach works for experienced traveler and expert negotiator Ashley Grayson. “The secret is: Don't wait until you have to complain,” he says. “Act immediately to get the optimum solution from the person in front of you.”
Grayson is a literary agent who knows a thing or two about using words effectively. So he offers this opening line: “I’ve got this terrible problem that I hope you can help with. But if you can’t, let’s get someone who can."
Longtime public radio host Bill Radke, also an expert with words, has had luck resolving travel issues with this opening line: “I’m looking for a hero here.”
Radke says he suspects the line works because “people want their work to matter. So in just the right circumstances, when the other party knows you're getting red-taped or shafted” the person at the hotel front desk or airline counter “might just step in to be your hero.”
And in a world of cranky, unhappy travelers, if someone is asking for the moon, why not be their star?
Harriet Baskas writes msnbc.com's popular weekly column, The Well-Mannered Traveler. She is the author of the “Stuck at the Airport” blog, a contributor to National Public Radio and a columnist for USATODAY.com.
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