Holidays may have been cut short, cancelled or postponed due to coronavirus however, travel agents have kept busy helping customers return home or re-book.
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Signature Travel owner manager Nicole Fallon said before returning travellers were placed into motel-based quarantine she and her staff worked hard to help their clients return to Australia where they could self-isolate at home.
"We've been working to get clients home before the borders shut and now its reallocating and booking future travel," Ms Fallon said.
"We have everyone back in the country which is great. It's a relief none are in quarantine in the hotels."
She said some of her clients were in Morocco but most were in the United Kingdom and Europe and they had trouble getting out due to the rapidly-changing pandemic.
"We had people come off cruises and they have been able to come back to Orange and isolate," Ms Fallon said.
However, not all the business's clients were on holidays.
"We had someone who was over there doing a 12-month work placement, some people were students and others were independent travelling," Ms Fallon said.
"The most challenging part was just working with the airlines.
"Obviously with COVID-19 its a changing situation,"
She said there were problems with pre-booked flights being cancelled and other schedule changes that resulted in flight cancellations that made it challenging for people to return to Australia.
She said staff spent hours on hold with airline companies at various times so they could make arrangements but travel within individual countries also had to be worked out in line with restrictions in those countries.
"We had other people who aren't clients who contacted us asking for help," she said.
Ms Fallon said most people who had decided to defer their holidays were booking trips for 2021 at the same locations.
"Some of them are looking at the end of this year, October, November, December, others are happy to book if for the same time next year whenever that may be," she said.
She said Signature Travel, which also operates as a member of the Hello World franchise, has five staff in Orange who are all travel agents.
"We're also as a business trying to put measures in place to see COVID-19 through so we are ready for the other side of this," Ms Fallon said.
"Hopefully moving forward this will lead people back to travel agents.
"People are going to be led towards advice-based travel rather than seeing, clicking, booking."
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