It seems like common sense to say that details matter with regard to travel, but you would be surprised at the number of reservations we get that are missing important details! Some of these details include the date of your pick up from the cruise port, the occupancy, or number of people in the room and the type of room you need (king bed or two double beds). If you are sharing a room with a friend but don’t want to sleep in the same bed, this is important! If you leave this information out and the hotel see’s that there is only an occupancy of two, they will default you to a room with one king! What seems like small details like the examples above, can have a big impact on your experience while traveling so take your time while making your travel plans. It is also, super helpful to re-confirm your travel plans before you leave for the hotel, airport or cruise port. Mistakes can and will happen!

Ok so why does empathy matter with regard to travel? To empathize, means to be able to put yourself into the proverbial shoes of another person. Let’s look at this from two different points of view. As a business owner, I will care more about you our customer than anyone else who may work for me. If I make a mistake and it effects you our customer in a negative way, it keeps me up at night. We do not hide from the truth, we admit our mistakes, apologize and make every attempt to make things right. Although the hotels staff does not work for me directly, they should be working for you our customer. From this point of view, the hotel staff, especially the front desk clerks must possess a degree of empathy in order to be effective representatives of the hotel. This means that they are the welcoming ambassadors of the hotels hospitality. I have removed hotels from our site for failing to do so. In some cases, they turned away confirmed reservations with no apology or concern for how our clients are feeling at that moment. When guests arrive at a hotel, they are often tired from their day of travel and just want to get to their room. From the point of view from the hotel desk staff this can been seen as a welcome challenge to see how they can put a smile on your face and make you feel welcome and at ease or just the opposite. To be clear, it’s a tough job! Not everyone has the degree of empathy or patients to maintain the energy & focus to keep this up for an 8 hour shift.

Now let’s look at this from your point of view, the traveler. Travel is often stressful! Depending on your itinerary, you may have a long drive to the airport followed by a trip to pick up your rental car and then off to the hotel. Even if this is not the case and you only have to drive several hours, the process of your preparations and packing have you feeling exhausted before you even leave the house! Feeling this way can lead to low tolerance for others who are also traveling under the same or similar conditions. This includes hotel staff that after their 7th hour on their shift has tuned into the door mat of the hotel from the welcoming ambassador!

Bottom line is that we need to have grace for each other, which is impossible with out empathy! This not only applies to travel but to all of our interactions with each other in life. We live in a culture of judging one another, sometimes very harshly without even knowing anything about the other. This is the opposite of having empathy or even compassion. I believe this is at the root of so many of our problems in our society. I am speaking as one who is very guilty of this behavior and striving to intentionally make a change not to do this any more. Trust me, it’s not easy and requires allot of discipline and patients.

So, let’s together strive to be counter cultural and move toward love and empathy and away from judging each other based on little to no knowledge of people we encounter in our travels!

Bruce
Trinity Reservations