Travel agency: staying reachable during customer appointments

A customer preparing a trip expects attention: they ask questions, compare options, hesitate. Interrupting the conversation to pick up gives the impression that the incoming call matters more, whereas letting it ring may lose a prospect. An agency with few staff can face this dilemma at every appointment.

The solution is not to choose between the two, but to decide, before the appointment, how the incoming call will be handled: who picks up the request, within what time, with what information.

A simple rule helps: before each appointment, the adviser tells colleagues, or notes on a shared medium, that they are unavailable for a given time and who takes the messages. Even in an agency reduced to one person, announcing on the answerphone that the adviser is in an appointment, with the time of the next call-back, is better than a ringtone that goes nowhere.

France’s Tourism Code (Code du tourisme) governs the sale of trips and holidays from its article L211-1 onwards. Article L211-8 requires the organiser or the retailer to inform the traveller, by means of a form set by regulation and before the contract is concluded, of the main features of the transport and accommodation services offered, the contact details of the retailer and the organiser, the price and payment terms, the conditions for cancellation and termination of the contract, information on insurance and the conditions for crossing borders. This information is presented in a clear, comprehensible and prominent way. The official Your Europe website, published by the European Union, states for its part that before a package travel contract is concluded, the organiser must make sure that the customer receives the essential information and a link to the standard information form.

Article L211-9 sets out the effects: the pre-contract information forms an integral part of the contract and can only be changed if the parties expressly agree. If the organiser or the retailer has not met its information obligations about additional costs before the contract is concluded, the traveller does not have to bear them, and the burden of proving that this information was given lies with the professional.

In practice, it is prudent for binding information to go through the form and the contract rather than through an exchange in passing during a call: the text does not forbid talking about prices on the phone, but it is for the professional to prove that they informed the traveller. A quick phone conversation is not the right setting for announcing a trip price or cancellation conditions. It serves to understand the project, qualify the request and set an appointment or a call-back.

A message such as “we will call you back before noon to clarify your request” is therefore better than an approximate promise of a price. This protects the customer, who will receive complete information, and the agency, which keeps a record of what it passed on and when.

A good call message for an agency contains the customer’s name, a call-back number, the destination or type of holiday envisaged, the approximate dates, the number of travellers, and the time when they can be reached. These elements let the adviser prepare the proposal before calling back, instead of taking the request from the beginning at the time of the call-back.

Calls from customers who have already signed, are about to leave or have already left are not handled like quote requests: last-minute change, delay, question about a document. A simple question about the trip reference makes it possible to spot them and pass them to the adviser who knows the file as soon as they are available.

Under article L211-9 of the Tourism Code, the burden of proving that the information obligations have been met lies with the professional. For an agency, this means it is useful to be able to show what was communicated, when and in what form: form handed over, quote sent, exchange of messages.

A follow-up note that records the date and subject of each contact, including incoming calls, completes this file. It does not replace the information form, but it makes it possible to retrieve the history of a request when the customer comes back with a question.

A fixed slot in the morning and another in the afternoon, devoted to call-backs, may be enough to stop messages piling up. It remains useful to indicate on the answerphone, on the website and on business cards the hours when advisers are in appointments, so that everyone knows what to expect.

For agencies that want to stay reachable during appointments, Alyas, an AI voice agent, answers using the information it is given (opening hours, how to book an appointment, useful documents), announces at the start of the call that it is an AI and that the conversation is recorded, then collects the customer’s contact details and project. It offers an appointment if Google Calendar or Cal.com is connected, leaves a transcript and a summary in the Alyas workspace, and, if it does not know, says so and offers to pass the request on. The 10-day free trial, with no card required, lets you assess it in real conditions.