Hi all, after reading all your comments and a lot of thinking we mailed to the gen manager> Believe it or not within 5 minutes we got a kind, polite and professional reply, with apologies and saying that is was certainly not their policy to make the employees pay , and that it had been an unfortunate 'initiative' of the employee to contact us with the request...( without knowledge of the management) but that we did not owe them anything . End of story but I still have a strange feeling about it...
Thanks everybody
ivee

Did the general manager acknowledge that there was a problem with the cost of your booking?

glad to hear you won't have to pay.

"initiative" - "unfortunate" ??? sounds very fishy to me. Those kinds of initiatives don't usually end well as far as I know.

But, that's great that management is helping you, and that it ended well!

A good result, you don't pay, and management saves face, however ridiculously. Of course if the agent's payments include targets for revenue and margin, then this mistake probably will hit them in the pocket book.

I could well believe it that the employee in question tried to coerce payment out of you on their own initiative.

If the company is a professional one, then it will certainly understand that, having agreed a price for a specific itinerary it must honour it. Even if it's employee made a mistake which wipes out their profit and perhaps even costs them more on top.

The manager may well have agreed that the company would honour your booking as it stands but told the employee that they would not get any commission because of the mistake. Whilst that's not as bad as being asked to pay for the shortfall it may have been enough to motivate them to try and undo the cost t the company in the hope of retrieving their commission?

At this point, I'd simply not worry about it any further (unless your strange feeling is related to them not delivering any of the services once you're on the ground).

Thanks Ivee for updating us. The manager's answer validates your decision not to immediately fork over 3 thou.

"Unfortunate initiative." Brilliant terms but I think we know what happened.

Hi Ivee! I'm glad to see that things worked out for you. I agree with Lynn and Momliz though...there is something fishy going on.

Moira

Glad to hear of the outcome and hope your "strange feeling" does not cause any more difficulty.

Con artists exist everywhere. That is why forums like this are so useful because it puts the whole playing field out in the open and anyone inclined to do so can cross check references etc in todays global marketplace with just a few clicks on a keyboard. It is so important to "know" the party you do business with. It can be a single person opertaion or a small firm or a big multinational - they all have the goods and the bads and it is upto us the clients to learn to sift throug this maze and zero in on the better outfits.

After all that is what fodors is helping us do innit?

Maybe I missed this on your previous post, but have you contacted the camps and the intra country airlines directly to confirm? knowing that everything has indeed been taken care of might ease that strange feeling.

I meant the 'strange feeling' mainly on what happened. They confirmed in writing that our trip will include all details as specified before and that there will be no additional costs asked from us; it's just that I don't know about the employee, but hope that it is true that she does not have to pay.. anyway perhaps they just trief to get at least something back..