Good for you Pembo. Thank yous make everyone feel better.
Case in point. In 1997, I prepurchased 4 roundtrip airplane tickets from Cleveland to Brussels at a cost of nearly $2600. We were going to visit friends in Antwerp. Then the airline workers at (I believe) American went on strike. For about 15 minutes. In order to regain the confidence of customers, American slashed their airfares by up to 50%. I figured (wrongly) that our
travel agent was taking care of checking into a refund for us as the ticket prices had dropped over $1000. She did nothing. By the time that I realized what was going on, I called the airline directly. I explained our situation and told the woman with whom I was speaking that I realized that there would be a $150 per ticket charge for reticketing, but that I would still be money ahead. She put me on hold for a couple of minutes. When she got back on the line, she told me that the airlines would refund me the entire $1000 if I would be willing to go to the airport within 24 hours to be reticketed. I was floored. At best I expected that I might receive a $400 credit voucher from the airline. But they were willing to refund nearly half of what I had originally paid for the tickets. Don't ask me how, but in the course of our conversation, I found out the name and work location of this wonderful person. Immediately after hanging up the phone, I called a florist near the call center where she worked and ordered a dozen red roses and a thank you card to be delivered to her.
The next evening, the phone rang. It was my friend from American Airlines calling to thank me for the thank you. She told me that the flowers were delivered on the 20th anniversary of her working for the airline and that in all that time, she had never received a thank you, much less a dozen roses. Of course, she then mentioned that she had probably never saved anyone $1000 in all those years either. We had a big laugh and I know that we enjoyed that European vacation a whole lot more thanks to the help from a total stranger.
Thank you for this thread.
