Leveraging Gavel Air Travel Negotiating Power

We obtained a group movement for a 7-night Mediterranean cruise in and out of Venice, Italy for ten consecutive weeks. The client’s program offered two nights of pre-extension in Venice before the cruise. We blocked out space on a major airline from JFK Airport to Venice for each of the ten group movements, round trip, with approximately 100 seats per movement. The airline changed their return trip departure time, which meant we could no longer utilize the block space due to the new departure time.

We contacted the airline’s sales office and group travel department to request the return flight from Venice to JFK be moved back to within 30 minutes of the original departure time. We advised the airline that if they could not change the departure time, we would not use the block space we had initially secured. The task of changing a departure time was considerably large and not easy for the airline.

We successfully negotiated the new departure time to accommodate our group movements. We were able to keep the original block space and avoided having to change the pre-extensions to post-extensions. Plus, we kept the original hotel blocks intact and kept the program within budget.