Getting all sorts of questions and requests are part of a travel agent’s job. Ahead of April Fool’s Day tomorrow, we got our agent friends to spill some of the most ridiculous, over-the-top and absurd requests they have received. Here are 10 weirdest requests agents had to dealt with.
1. “A client asked: ‘If I don’t pay for a seat reservation on my flight, will I have to stand?'”
2. “After informing a client that a visa is needed to travel to Vietnam, he responded: “I have a MasterCard, will I need to speak to my bank and change it over?”
3. “A guest complained that he didn’t get a seaview room in a Kuala Lumpur hotel.”
4. “A Middle Eastern guest staying at a luxury property in Langkawi facing the rainforest asked me the following day if I wanted to kill him. His theory was that trees gave out carbon dioxide at night and so he thought I was trying to suffocate him.”
5. “Many years ago a man from Yorkshire greeted me at the beginning of a tour and said: ‘I don’t like fish. Now don’t get me wrong I like fish but I don’t eat them.’ There was no ‘Hello’ or ‘How do you do.’ I was, of course, non-plussed by his abrupt statement, particularly as we were in Japan. This set the tone for the rest of the tour as his wife would quickly remove any fish from his plate at mealtimes. When she failed to do this quickly at one dinner, he immediately returned to their room not to be seen for the rest of the evening.”
6.”A client, whose zodiac sign is Virgo, asked whether her husband and their s on could also cruise on board Superstar Virgo even though they are Aquarian and Capricorn, respectively.”
7. “A well-coiffed lady arranging a trip to Africa for her and her husband asked whether we could arrange a one-way ticket for her husband and do whatever it takes for him to never (come home). We never found out whether the lady was serious or was merely joking.”
8. “A man asked for the telephone number of a pretty Vietnamese lady he met on his Vietnam holiday. He just couldn’t remember where or when.”
9. “We run trips into the tropical jungle of Cambodia’s Cardamom Mountains and we were asked many times to ensure there are no mosquitos or bugs in the jungle.”
10. “A client wanted to visit Dubai with family so I suggested a dhow cruise to him. When he came back he complained that it was not a cruise as he expected a big ship. He then tried to convince me that cruising can only involve large ships.”
This article was contributed by Adelaine Ng, S Puvaneswary, Marissa Carruthers, Rosa Ocampo, Julian Ryall and Rohit Kaul
