Enterprise Rent-a-Car’s Seattle location received the 2010 Unsuspecting Travel Hero Award for providing a completely unexpected, pleasant, efficient and highly personalized experience with the typically mundane task of picking up an off-airport rental car. In a year highlighted by stays in luxury hotels, flying first class and endless discussions of how travel experiences can be improved, it is obvious that great service delivery and exceeding customer expectations still reigns supreme. Recognized for undermining its fundamental brand promise by gutting its hotel ratings policy, Hotwire received the 2010 Unsuspecting Travel Zero Award. Hotwire’s new hotel ratings criteria not only replaces formerly clear and detailed descriptions with ambiguous and nonsensical drivel, but creates loopholes for the company to sneak lower quality hotels into higher categories. Hotwire’s leaders should be ashamed of confusing what they apparently thought was cleverness with outright customer hostility.
2009 Unsuspecting Travel Hero and Travel Zero Awards
January 3, 2010 By 2 Comments
Four Seasons’ Santa Barbara Resort, The Biltmore received the 2009 Unsuspecting Travel Hero Award for proactively responding to a guest who had an issue with the music playing on the radio after the hotel’s turn down service made up the room. A relatively small issue that was cleverly identified and elegantly addressed in a highly personalized manner. Recognized for its multi-faceted, yet consistently customer hostile advance seat assignment policy, AirTran Airways received the 2009 Unsuspecting Travel Zero Award. The AirTran policies fundamentally insult a traveler’s intelligence while simultaneously wasting their time – truly a remarkable accomplishment.
