Cheryl:
Please forward this to the agency that is doing our tour organization. If required, print this out and send it
by mail since they seem not to have email capabilities.

Dear agency representative:

The members of the chorus have paid roughly $250,000 to the travel organizers for their 10 days in England. We know that this money is needed to pay for more than our air ticket and 10 days of shared hotel rooms, but it is still a
substantial sum for 10 days. But, it seems unreasonable for any corporation that handles this amount of money to not respond with an email to their clients with the details of the already fully paid trip. We would appreciate details for friends and visitors with the best known concert times and dates and a tentative itinerary that could be updated once per month?

Unless your agency is very very old, the letters that they are sending you must be prepared on a computer before printing. Cutting and pasting to an email is a small exercise the first time and obvious afterwards. I can understand that 250,000 may not be enough to pay for monthly paper updates, but posting the changes and recent information to 1 email (which would then appear on the chorus web page) would take less than 30 minutes per month - at 100$ per hour for 5 such events, that works out to a 250$ labor charge. I guess the 0.1% extra cost would cut into the small profits too much to allow this - therefore we must be kept in the dark!

I (on behalf of other paying members) have been asking for this for 3 months and have never received any response from the tour organizers nor have we been given an email address for anyone in that group. If no one uses email there, then I will suggest to the chorus that we try to find someone next time that uses email. Given the prices that we can find for our tickets (under 650$ for same dates on Continental) versus $850+ that we are paying in a group savings mode through the agency, a similar reduction overall that might be found by someone that knows how to use the web to setup travel might run 600$ off the total. While I know that this kind of calculation ignores many other variables, the lack of use of the web and/or email implies that many such discounts are likely being missed.

To mail something to the choral web page, just send a text email (please convert Word or other attachments to text or HTML if you know how) to hscgen @ www.choral.org and they will be posted within minutes at a location where the paying travelers
can see the results.

Thank you for doing your best to provide us with the best travel options and schedule and for investigating the use of email between your employees and your clients.

Ian Fetterley
Webmaster and Bass in Houston Symphony Chorus