Ever wonder just how much training a travel agent gets to plan and book oneworld RTW tickets? Would you be disappointed (or surprised) to learn that it less than an hour?
I got an email yesterday morning letting me know that the training is now available in six different languages (Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Japanese and Spanish were introduced as new alongside the established English). That’s pretty cool as an upgrade to the site on its own merits, of course, but I figured I’d click on the page to poke around. It seems that the “training” isn’t really limited only to travel agents; anyone can sign up for an account. So I did. And, about 45 minutes later, I received the certificate affirming my status as a Round-the-World Explorer Specialist.
The training modules are very, very basic. They talk about the fare booking classes (but not exceptions such as how to book a F RTW on a 2-cabin plane), routing policies and a few other bits. There’s a hands on section where they make you use the oneworld.com trip planner tool to price out a specific RTW and get some data for quiz answers which I thought was actually pretty cool as far as interactive training goes. The part where my version of the itinerary crashed the trip planner was less cool, but I still got that question correct on the quiz. Lucky guess, I suppose.
As an introduction to the product and how it works I think that the system is actually pretty good. But there’s no way I’d say that sitting through it makes me an expert. And I would imagine the same applies for anyone else using the training curriculum. But at least I got a nifty certificate out of the deal.
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We never doubted you — we always knew you are certifiable! 😉
OW requires all agents of all partner airlines to trained on how to issue/reissue each others fares and tickets. If they are doing this with such simple training god help OW pax….