I recently had an astounding discussion with my travel agent about changing my business class ticket for an upcoming trip. Due to the fluid nature of one of the companies I work with, I need to CANCEL the last two legs of this upcoming flight. In other words, I would have been happy to just get off the trip at the end of the first leg and not fly the last two flights all the way back to Skopje.
The company that I work with, would have then just booked me a separate flight to the board meeting in Malta and then on to Skopje afterwards. I was not asking for a refund or credit (though I gladly would have taken it, had it been offered). This potential change in plans would have saved the airline thousands of dollars by freeing up several business class seats on two different flights.
Instead, Lufthansa insisted that I pay 2500 euros in order to save them money, seats, labor and effort, by ending my return flight with them in Frankfurt!! So of course we are not going to take that option. Thus we set about just changing the flight to a single economy seat flight to Malta from Frankfurt, once again, saving them two business class seats/flights that they then could have sold to another customer. They only wanted 900 euros to effect this particular change!
Needless to say, we took none of these options. Lufthansa lost thousands of dollars by not working with me on this. I am sure this makes sense to someone somewhere, but for the life of me (and my client) we can’t figure it out at all. This makes no business sense in any way for a regular business in the for-profit sector. I understand that they have their policies and procedures, but Lufthansa costs me several grand last year with similar situations, when I was shuffling flights because of my brother’s death and my mom’s death. Made no matter to Lufthansa. This is not my idea of business agility or customer service.
The lesson I need to take away here is that I can choose policies and procedures and have all the SOP I want, but they should never be more important than the person who pays my bills and keeps me in business.
