All my life I've received the AAA info about roadside assistance. Well, I'm 70 now and I finally decided to become a member. Along with the welcome packet was information on how great AAA was at planning your next trip to where ever. AAA offered discounts, and planning help. This year we decided to mark a cruise to Alaska off our bucket list, and decided to utilize AAA's travel services. They have a great building and office off People's Street in JC.
nice accommodations. But no receptionist, so you have to wait for someone to become free to get your name in the cue of the person you want to see. We met with Tia who was nice enough, but only had one option prepared for us, she tried to piece together another option while we watched and listened how their computers were so slow and that she didn't know that much about the Alaska trips. We finally came up with a plan but we had to pay for it within 24 hours, which was fine, but, after the lack luster service we received we knew we would need the time to double check everything and look for other options. We didn't leave AAA with a lot of confidence in the travel service. We were also told that she would put together our options for flights to Seattle and would call the next day. We called twice asking about the flights with no response, finally on the fourth day we got ahold of Tia. Who had a flight plan that included another have to pay for within 24 hours. Again we took it home to check our options, her plan had us returning to Seattle on the ship at 07:00am and not flying out till 23:00 that night, 16 hours sitting in the airport after our cruise. We both got the feeling that our dream trip to Alaska was just an annoying task to get scheduled and marked off her list. Anyway cancelled those flights and booked our own with much better connection and lay over times. The entire process was driven by us asking questions with little to no feedback or suggestions. I did ask "What is the benefit of going through AAA to plan our vacation? do we get better rates?" The answer was "No", I just have access to things on the computer that you don't. Bottom line we did not get any discounts or advantages by utilizing AAA for our dream trip. We did reach out to the manager of the JC branch, she apologized and told us that Tia had issues with time management and this would be a good opportunity for coaching and development. But, we do have the AAA sticker on our car in case of a road side emergency, which I've read is a great service. We'll see. read more
