Once Again P&O Make My Job Impossible!!

So this weeks gripe is once again about one of the oldest problems I’ve faced in my 12 years in the cruise industry.

Yes it’s our old British favourite, P&O cruises.

Now when sailing, I generally really enjoy P&O as a brand.

Fantastically British, easy to understand, polite staff, and a good standard on board. I’ve known my clients get the old bad apple, but 9 times out of 10 they enjoy themselves immensely, and book with them again.

But behind the scenes, P&O are not so easy to do business with from my point of view, particularly when it comes to late space and last minute cruises, and this is the problem that I have had no less than 4 times this week!

In a nutshell, P&O’s booking system is very straight forward, you check the cabins, check the price, agree everything with your client, and BOOM, you have a cruise booked. However, P&O’s system also has a knack of altering prices mid conversation, and at bizarre times of the day.

So I’m chatting to one of my clients the other day, and she decides to book her family in August, great I think. So she goes away to check with her husband about the time off work etc, and comes back to me about 45 minutes later – this conversation happened about 11:30am by the way, right in the middle of the day, so not 5pm business hours, or midnight etc, nothing out of the ordinary time wise.

So my clients comes back to me once she’s sorted and is ready with her card to book and pay.

I go in to pull up the details, and the total price has increased by £200!

Must be a mistake I think……..

So I start again and bring up the details……..

Nope still showing £200 more. So I call P&O to check and explain that I have a willing client, ready to book two cabins, yes two cabins! Only to be told that the price went up at 1pm. I look down at my clock, it’s 1:15pm!

Ok I say, but surely you can go back to the initial price given that I was in the process of making the bookings for the guest. ‘No’ I am told.

Case closed as far as they were concerned.

So that was it, the client unfortunately was already stretching their budget, such is the rather expensive cost of summer cruises, had to call it off.

So they lost out on a summer holiday, and I lost out on business, as did P&O, for the sake of £200. Crazy.

But this exact same thing has now happened to me in the past week another 3 times, each of the times, the price again going up.

To the client, this makes me look horrendously unprofessional, and it must seem to them like I’ve just ‘decided’ to add on more money for our benefit. That’s what I’d think anyway. But I can assure you potential cruise bookers that not only me, but none of us here would do that. As your agent I want you to get the best price, that’s my job. I’m not some conman, I’m a professional Cruise Consultant (with morals I might add).

So P&O, I’ve got news for you, what you are doing is detrimental to our business, your business, and loses the faith of our mutual customers. The system you have in place that hikes the prices up mid conversation is utterly stupid, and the person in charge should address this huge problem for us agents. It’s diabolical business, and exceptionally frustrating. End of the day we are selling cabins for you! Why take that away!

Here is my suggestion:

If price hikes are going to happen, they should be done on a daily basis, so at midnight, If your system is automatic, you can set it up to change prices at this time. Problem solved. No more angry agents. No more frustrated customers.

Anyway it’s my day off today, so I’m off to enjoy it, thanks for reading my blog today, I’m sure nothing will happen and my comments will get ignored but I certainly feel better for having this little rant about it.

Have a great day everyone, and as always, until next time………..