yah give me good service

i went around a bit in the afternoon settling the last bits of my air tickets. i got my refund done pretty smoothly, and i popped over to B&L travel at Adelphi (no, not product placement!), where I asked for a couple of quotes a few days earlier at my trip to the dentist. By the way, my teeth were so bad he couldn't finish cleaning it in one session. It's not a good thing to announce to the world, but then again, with the way I'm living, I'm not surprised I have bad teeth.

Yes, anyway, apart from giving me a consistent, good price (yes, that means no changing your price after 3 days or such), i said, well it's cheap, and i gave them a call earlier in the morning, specifically this motherly figure called esther. after returning my email promptly, (which ended with CALL ME!!!), i promptly called. anyway, well after the administrative booking advice was over she proceeded to give me travel advice, how her daughter who went to canada got screwed over by s'pore airport officials, so on and so forth, quite entertaining, compared to calling one of the larger agents or less friendlier ones who are dying to get you off the phone and earn more commisions and still charge larger fares!

so i decided to go down and settle invoicing, and she did my ticket and all, talked to me about "yi ge ren qu lun dun, yi ding hui ren di sheng shu..." and the experience her brother had who ended up staying in london for 23 years, gave me his number, told me to ring him if he needs help, asking about me, and i asked about her family which seems to be all over the place... it's all so different from gimme your card, swipe, ok, come back on xxx to collect. ok. bye. it's a personal touch, well, maybe it's sometimes a luxury you can't afford, but, if you do business in an ethical and sincere way, and, as a customer, you also behave sincerely (meaning, try not to screw them over by booking/refund, being an arsehole customer in general), you get good relationships and you enjoy your work (getting return customers aside).

yes, you can't be friendly to everyone, but it doesn't hurt, and just on a day when i was thinking of the fundamental immorality of a company being responsible to shareholders, it's nice to see that business can be done well. more rants, i promise, on the immorality of modern capitalism next time!