I know I said a while back that all travel agents love Italy, and that's still true, but right now I personally hate Italy. I am coordinating no less than eight trips there, and everyone is going to the same three places: Rome, Florence, Venice. I have never been to Rome, Florence, or Venice. I'm under a lot of pressure to find the perfect hotel for everyone, which isn't something new or unusual. I'm always booking hotels for people in cities I've never visited. What's making it so difficult is this year everyone and their dog is going to Italy, and I am not exaggerating. It's a Jubilee Year, a holy year, and there are fewer and fewer hotels available every time I look. From May through August the few hotels I rely on are almost entirely booked up or more expensive than usual, which means my usual first and second choices don't apply. And because I've never been there, I rely heavily on the computer descriptions, hotel web sites, our trade magazines and books on hotels, and word of mouth from clients and other agents to help me make decisions on what will be a suitable third or fourth choice for people.

What it comes down to is I'm being asked to be the knowledgable resource for something I have only a surface acquaintence with based on second hand information, and I feel increasingly like a fraud as each day passes. I'm not just doing these trips, of course, though they're complicated enough. One group has seven people, half of whom are departing from a different city. One group has ten adults, five kids, and a baby. One is a personal friend who touchingly told me she was sure I could do better than the Internet. Several are honeymoon couples going to Italy for the first time; as you can imagine, I'm anxious not to screw up their special trip by choosing the wrong hotel room.

Yesterday I actually panicked and jumped up from my desk, overwhelmed by the amount of work I had to do. It's not just the Italy trips, you see. There's also the man and his unwell, arthritic wife who need just the right unstrenuous tour of Europe, if such a thing exists. They were thinking of Italy, but I may persuade them to wait on that until next year and go to Lisbon instead. There's the family who want to go to Scandanavia. Yes, all of it. There's the five young adults who have their hearts set on a snowboarding vacation in Portillo, Chile, a destination I've never sold before; I have no clue who offers packages there. I haven't even found it on the map yet. There's the gal who wants to go to Egypt and Jordan in the fall, though that one's simple as she basically knows which tours she wants. And then there's the More Money Than Sense Family who have decided to go to Tahiti for two weeks even though I have done my best to persuade them they won't like it. It's true: they're Type A's, they demand only the best, most recently renovated hotels, they can't stand traveling in anything but limos and first class, and they rarely stay in one hotel longer than five days. They'll go out of their minds in funky, laid back, tropical Tahiti. All of these trips, fun as they usually are, require a bit of research, which means time and phonecalls and faxes, which means waiting for replies, which means juggling emails and phonecalls from the clients anxious for results.

And of course I don't get to just stop taking phonecalls during all of this. I handle 30-50 calls a day for corporate clients who need air, car, and hotel pronto. I also handle follow up calls from other agents' clients if those other agents are on the phone, so I do my fair share of changing flights and adding hotels to itineraries for people other than my own bookings. I have several past-dated messes to write to various hotels and airlines about, stuff like no-show charges to be disputed, double charged tickets, etc. And don't forget, we break down and put together our own tickets. In my case, the pile of pink invoices with attached ticket coupons has gotten so large I feel guilty all the time about not having done more than snatched out the few paper tickets in there to put together. Electronic tickets wait since the clients don't technically need them to travel and most of my business travelers rely on the email copies of the invoices we send instead of the paper invoices for actual travel. But they want those paper invoices as soon as possible for their expense reports, so it doesn't do to wait more than two or three days to get them in the mail, and thus my anxiety increases every day I get behind. Yesterday, it finally spiked.

I jumped up and ran back to my assistant boss's desk and stared at her like a deer into headlights. "Help!" I intoned breathlessly, face pale and fingers clenched. And she did. She gave me permission to pass my invoices off to our receptionist. She let me take half an hour off the phones to organize myself. I went through my piles of paper and sorted things into Now, Soon, and Later. I typed up two letters, got a paper copy of a microfiche made after weeks of delay, faxed all kinds of hotels, called in payments, returned a few phone calls, and finally booked some hotels in Italy for half of my eight trips. I got my breath back.

I'm a really hard worker. I'm also pretty darned organized, and efficient. I loathe watching my workload get out of control, but sometimes there's nothing I can do about it. We need another full time agent in my office, but apparently we're not going to get one. This kind of thing is likely to keep happening. I feel a dull, heavy sense of doom every time I think about it. All I can do is plod on, and run to my bosses when it all threatens to collapse under sheer volume. In the meantime, it doesn't stop being fun to work on exotic trips overseas. I just stop having time to enjoy it.

Do me a favor. Don't go to Italy this year.

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