Working behind the scenes.

When you go on a hotel, call up a company complaining about something that is completely unfair and not your fault- at all; have you ever thought about the people on the other side of the phone?

I’ve been on numerous holidays with Wasteland Ski, all of them absolutely fantastic. Never had a problem and it has always run smoothly. I know this isn’t always the case- someone’s bag always gets lost and the car picking up is always half an hour late. Maybe when you get to the resort you find that someone else is in your apartment or your hotel has been double booked. In all these situations the first person you turn to is the company you booked it all through. For my skiing holidays this has always been Wasteland Ski. Calm, reassuring and always with a good bit of advice; Wasteland’s London office is always there to lend a helping hand- especially when you don’t speak a word of French or German. With university students, families and all the others who book holidays with Wasteland, they all forget the fact that we here, in the office, are only trying to do our job in the quickest most effective way possible. We all can make mistakes and sometime dealing with complaints and issues with both customers and local businesses can be extremely challenging and, at times, frustrating. I’ve been at Wasteland Ski for two weeks on work experience and while I have been here I have spoken with Universities, independent schools, clients and tiny little hotels in the French Alps. Each task presents its own set of unique challenges some as minimal as trying to sort timetables for students’ coach trips to Val Thorens for BUSC, and others trying to book hotel rooms in very basic- school- French. The amount of work that goes on in the office is staggering. We receive nearly one hundred call a day (no exaggeration) in the height of the ski season with problems as menial as “We are we going to Val d’Isere, France. Is that in Europe?” Dealing with people who ask questions as mad as this is frustrating and it’s sometimes hard to keep a straight face. I’ve only worked here for two weeks, but in those two weeks I have run two competitions on our Facebook and Twitter pages. I’ve organised our stationery cupboard- no easy task I assure you- and packaged up seventeen jackets and sixteen thousand ‘Wasteland Sun’ flyers, along with other, less interesting, spreadsheet related tasks. But, what I have done is what people in this office do year in year out. By working at Wasteland it has opened my eyes to the opportunities available at universities- and the long holidays they get- and the type of skills you need to work at a travel and tourism company. So, next time you book a holiday through Wasteland think about the person on the other side of the phone who at that moment is probably also organising a ski trip for fifteen hundred university students!