Professional, calm and reassuring travel agent

I recently had a very stressful experience with booking flight tickets for an upcoming trip in London.

I had tried to book a particular itinerary for 4 September to multiple cities in Europe.

I tried booking this myself for over 2 hours I was quite stressed about this especially since I had invested so much time into trying to get specific flights at a reasonable price. It was very frustrating!

The next morning I did the same thing. Same problem. So I called Travelstart. I spoke to Tanya Behrmann and from the get go - she was great. Calm, personable and very professional over the phone. She really listened when I told her what the problem was and did her absolute best to help me. She checked the itinerary I gave her and walked me through exactly how I should book it.

She then informed me that she could offer me alternative flights, even cheaper than I could see on the website, she suggested Qatar or Emirates. She then came up with a flight that was better in terms of total travel time, cheaper and she even booked my luggage for me on my LHR-ZRH flight. Hallelujah! The flight she eventually got for me was R11 700, so R600 cheaper than my initial find and with baggage that I would have had to purchase at the airport once in London. The connections she found were really good.

She asked me what type of passport I would be travelling on and then checked if I knew that I would need visas for both UK and Switzerland - also telling me that that were two different visas. (I knew this at the time because I had checked with the embassy, but most people wouldn't and this is highly valuable information if you're an ******** traveller who could find themselves in a tricky situation later).

When I had to make payment, I again stressed out and thought I had made a mistake because I had not received an immediate confirmation after paying. I then sent an email to Tanya and she promptly called informing that there was nothing to worry about and that she just needed to process it as this payment would need to be done manually.

Tanya was great. She is exactly the type of person you want to deal with when you're trying to handle the stresses of travel. Professional, calm and reassuring. She was innovative and saw solutions too my problem and didn't hesitate to make herself available in case I had further questions or concerns, even informing when would be best to contact her. I cannot speak higher of Travelstart after this.