A flight is cancelled at nine in the evening. A customer is at an airport with two children and no information beyond a screen.
She telephones the operator she booked through. The line is closed. The airline's line has a very long wait. The email address promises a response within two working days.
She books a hotel herself, rebooks herself, spends a considerable amount, and will spend the following three months trying to recover it from somebody. What she needed in that hour was somebody to tell her what to do.
The first failure: disruption does not observe office hours
It is concentrated in evenings and at weekends, and the lines available are staffed for a normal weekday enquiry rate.
The second failure: everybody contacts at once
A cancelled flight produces a surge within minutes, which is why a queue that normally works stops working entirely.
The third failure: nobody says who is responsible
Airline, operator, agent or insurer, which the customer must determine while standing in a terminal and which nobody explains.
The fourth failure: the entitlement is not stated
What they are owed, what the provider will arrange and what they should do themselves, which determines their next hour.
The fifth failure: the should I book it myself question is unanswered
The single most consequential question, since doing the wrong thing affects whether anything is recoverable afterwards.
The sixth failure: the receipts requirement is not explained
What to keep and what will be needed, which is impossible to reconstruct afterwards and is the commonest reason a claim fails.
The seventh failure: the onward arrangements are forgotten
Transfers, accommodation and activities booked separately, which also need changing and which nobody mentions.
The eighth failure: the customer is asked to explain repeatedly
Each contact starting from nothing, which for somebody in a terminal at eleven at night is genuinely distressing.
The ninth failure: the accessibility and medical needs are not carried forward
Which is the specificity required in accessibility and mobility questions from travellers.
The tenth failure: the claim process is explained afterwards
When it should be explained during, so the customer does the things that make a claim possible.
The eleventh failure: proactive contact does not happen
The provider frequently knows before the customer does and does not use that time to tell anybody anything.
The twelfth failure: the recovery is measured in refunds
And not in whether the customer books again, which is the actual cost of a badly handled disruption.
The thirteenth failure: the customer who sorted it themselves is treated worst
Somebody who solved their own problem competently at midnight returns to a claims process that treats them with more suspicion than the customer who did nothing and waited. That is precisely the wrong incentive.
The fourteenth failure: nobody contacts the customer afterwards
A disruption handled badly and then never mentioned again leaves the customer to conclude the company hoped they would forget. A short message a week later, acknowledging it, recovers relationships that a refund alone does not.
The fix: be reachable at eleven at night with the right answer
An assistant that explains immediately who is responsible, what the customer is entitled to, whether they should make their own arrangements, what receipts to keep and what to do about onward bookings changes the hour that decides whether they travel with you again. Handled with the care in how to handle sensitive questions in your chatbot, alongside tour operators answering the same itinerary questions. Start at try, see features, and the sector view sits under travel.