Posted on 24/04/2014
Your travel arrangements are confidential
No, you can’t call us about your friends booking or even family members, not unless they give us permission to do so or can answer our three security questions.
We comply with the data protection act which compels us to keep all client data secure, as you should find with all travel companies.
Our staff are fully aware of the regulations and put them in practice on a daily basis.
That’s not to say that we are stubbornly impenetrable, we run a business where families are involved and sometimes, just sometimes we need to assist those families.
Here is just such an example, the characters are not real and any similarities to any real people are coincidental.
Frank calls one of our agents and tells us that his mother has not arrived back from her visit abroad. We ask Frank for his mothers name and the date she left, he doesn’t know the date she left and the name he gives us is similar but not exactly the same as his mothers.
Our agent apologizes to Frank and informs him that without the correct information we cannot assist.
But Frank insists that he is at the airport (we can hear airport noises) everyone from the flight has come out, he has checked with airport information and that no one fitting his mother’s description is being held up for any reason.
Our agent can tell that Frank is clearly distressed, why would he be at the airport if not to pick up someone and so decides to ask Frank some more questions about his mother, where she lives, where she went to, how long has she been gone etc. After a while we get the picture that our passenger, Frank’s mother seems to be missing.
At this point what do we do, we owe it to our client to keep their information confidential, but we also owe it to her to let her family know if something has gone wrong, don’t we?
It’s a judgment call and after a brief discussion with other staff members it is decided that Frank doesn’t need to know that his mother changed her date to stay longer, if she wanted him to know she would have let him know herself. Our agent apologizes to Frank and tells him that his mother was not on this flight, that we are not able to give him any more information due to client confidentiality and that he should try to contact his mother.
This goes to show that things are not always black or white and we will use our best endeavors to do the right thing to the benefit of our client.