In a day where companies are pushing for more and more self-service and automation, one company has proven the opposite. Chatflights is an app-based travel agency where customers chat with an agent to book their flights.
On the surface, travel agents may appear as a relic of the past — which they are, to a certain extent. As most airlines offer sophisticated tools for online booking, many people may question: why hire a travel agent in the first place?
Maximize the value of your air miles
The answer is fairly simple. For any booking that you can’t manage on your own, consider hiring a travel agent to take care of that for you. One area where Chatflights managed to find their niche is points redemptions. For anyone who’s attempted to use their airline miles or credit card points there is a plethora of redemption options, transfer partners, and booking portals. After all, frequent flyer programs are cash cows for the airlines and banks. While they make it easy to rack up large amounts of miles, using them is getting increasingly harder, especially when it comes to extracting the maximum amount of value for the points.
This is where Chatflights enter the picture. The points experts help their customers maximize the value of their points by finding the best deals, and taking care of the booking process for them. All in a seamless experience.
Chatflights helps you navigate the challenges of pandemic travel
Once the pandemic hit, customers were faced with a host of new challenges in addition to the hurdles of finding award availability and getting the seats booked. Schedule changes and flight cancellations have become commonplace and while this was something that rarely happened prior to the pandemic it’s something that Chatflights deals with on a daily basis.
Airlines have maintained their full schedule for sale as a means of maximizing cash flow but, in fact, many airlines sell flights with no intention of operating. What this means is that you can very well end up booking a flight that with all certainty will end up getting canceled, you just don’t know when and which flight.
Frequent flight cancellations and rebooking have put a big strain on airline call centers where wait times of upwards of 6 hours aren’t uncommon. Having a travel agent to take care of your rebooking needs is essential in times like these. Moreover, there have been times where Chatflights agents have managed to go above and beyond to get their customers home in time of need.
Having a travel agent to take care of your rebooking needs is essential in times like these
One example of this was at the start of the pandemic. Back in March of 2020 one couple, longtime Chatflights customers, embarked on their annual Florida trip. The trip was cut short due to the looming lockdowns, and the couple was scrambling to find a way to get home. As flights were being canceled options were getting fewer, and this coupled with the fact that the few flights that were operating were getting fully booked by the minute.
As this was right at the start of the pandemic the airlines still hadn’t introduced their flexible ticket change policies and as the couple had already begun their journey their tickets didn’t allow for any changes. Luckily, one of Chatflights’s agents managed to convince the airline to let them rebook to an earlier flight, and they were able to get back home just in time before the lockdowns went in place.
