The world of airline reservations is a very complicated one, where you are to learn or consult around 1000 pages of manuals on a huge variety of air traffic regulations, different types of bookings etc, coupled with an equally complicated Amadeus program. Armed with this comprehensive information and skills (to the extent you’ve mastered them), you are to handle 40 to 50 calls from often demanding, dissatisfied or angry passengers, while following an acribically detailed set of quality guidelines.
Especially the times of strikes, attacks, or bad weather conditions causing cancellations of flights mean a lot of stressful calls, where you are supposed to rebook passengers while having few available seats on alternative flights to choose from. While doing this, you have to follow a different set of rules than usual when it comes to alternative routes, start or destination airports and booking and flight dates.
Meanwhile, the company does not secure a normal working environment, regarding above all the level of noise on the floor, and the behaviour of a number of agents there.
At the same time, they had very high demands regarding the accuracy and scope of information and tasks agents had to handle.
I know of several agents who have had to, as a consequence of the stress caused by all of this, go on sick leave.
The tables, screen and the keyboard are often filthy and dusty, you will have to clean them yourself at the beginning of the shift. The extent to which the small openable windows - ca 30 cm wide - can be opened is too small for a decent airflow in the office.
Because of the complicated nature of this job, it is often that you have to call the helplines to ask for help in solving a problem. When doing that, it is not uncommon to be met with contempt, coldness and arrogance, the helpline agent implying or directly saying you should know the solution by now.
There are a number of centres serving the same markets as this one, so you often get bookings that were previously handled by someone from another center not known for a high level of work ethic or responsibility. Meaning, you will have to correct what others have messed up, do the work that others have evaded, or will have to explain the particular problem present in a booking to a passenger that was grossly misinformed by an agent from another center.
The answer I got from the management regarding this, was that this was something we simply had to live with.
The training will prepare you for around 15% of the situations and topics on the calls. You will be expected to study the training materials after work, in order to pass weekly tests containing trick questions and overly complicated tasks one very rarely finds on the actual calls.
The bonus does increase with time and eventually constitutes around one third of your salary - which is also a problem. Namely, vacation days, sick leave days, as well as arriving late to work or from a break all result in reductions of the bonus. As a result of this, on average every second month you get a reduced bonus, i.e. salary.
Shift work and irregular off days are another drawback. It happens that the schedule is such that you get 6 consective working days, followed by one day off, followed by another 5 working days. This makes an already stressful and tiring job even more so. To prevent this, one has to intervene with the team leader to make a change, but often one has to take care of that oneself by finding someone willing to swap off days with him, or to use one bank holiday off day.
Shift work with changing morning, afternoon and evening shifts makes having a life outside of work very difficult.
One of the managers looked for existing or non-existing things she could find performance-wise to take away the bonus money from the agents, or pressure them to resign. At least one person resigned because of that during my stay there.
The upper management seemed to have been promoted to their positions based primarily on having worked there a long time.
Promotion process within the company lacks transparency.
They should implement a basic dress code, instead of allowing people to come to work in filthy sweat pants, or shorts. This negatively affects the working environment, as well as the attitude these agents themselves have towards the office and the job. It is symptomatic of the misguided views in the leadership that the lack of a basic dress code is actually seen by some in the senior management as one of the positive things about working there.