The Good Along with the Bad

BAD: During my second week of interning I made my first "big" mistake at the GPCVB. A person emailed me asking for their departure date to be changed from June 26th to June 27th. When I looked up the reservation, I noticed that it was already set to the departure date of June 27th, so I copied the confirmation information and emailed it to the lady informing her that it was already set for departure on the 27th. The next morning I received a phone call from my supervisor asking me to go to her office to discuss the Hennessy reservation. She informed me that I had looked up the last name of Hennissie, rather than Hennessy. Fortunately, I had not modified Hennissie's reservation because if I had done that, then I would have had some explaining to do to them and I would have had to go back in and put their departure date back to what it was. In the end we were able to fix Hennessey's reservation. GOOD: The lesson I learned from this was to pay extremely close attention to all aspects of a person's reservation, including their first and last name (and the spelling of those), the acknowledgement number, the person's address, the hotel they are staying at, the dates of their reservation, and even their phone number and/or email address. From then on, I have made sure that I am modifying the proper reservation.

BAD: On Thursday of my second week, we found out that a group (I am not allowed to say what group) had cancelled their conference that was going to be held here. It is a very scary thing because the Housing ladies had already done a lot of work to set up everything involved with the hotels and meeting planners for the conference. Additionally, thousands of dollars had already been spent doing all of that, which puts the bureau at a loss of money, not to mention all the money the city could have gained if the conference was held in Phoenix. Furthermore, there were already 458 hotel reservations made for the conference. Those, of course, all had to be cancelled individually. GOOD: If you are wondering why I know the amount of reservations that had been made, well, I got to be the lucky one to go in and delete them all and write down their cancellation number. It was not as bad as it sounds though because I enjoy repetitiveness, to a certain extent, and I certainly was able to master the process of canceling a reservation. I also believe that experiencing the cancellation was a good slap in the face of reality.

BAD: When I first started interning at the GPCVB there were only two other interns there who were part time and one of the girls was only going to be there for one more week. It was a bit lonely and nerve racking being new and being faced with the choice of secluding myself, or stepping out on a limb and talking to people, which I did. Not to mention, that task is more than out of my comfort zone so I have already done some growing. GOOD: Now that I have completed my third week at the internship, I have already started to feel more comfortable there. It has also helped that most everyone is very friendly and welcoming. Moreover, three new interns have started this week. It is comforting to know that the four of us are basically all in the same boat and we can relate to each other.