Travel: rebooking calls that arrived from the wrong number, and what the customer’s phone actually showed

When a flight is cancelled, the clock starts. Seats on the next departure go quickly, and the passengers who are reached first get the good options. A travel company’s contact centre had a few hours to ring several hundred people, and on a bad day they were calling more passengers than they were reaching.

Two problems that looked like one

The first was spam labelling, which the team already knew about. The second was newer. Some calls were being presented with a different number from the one the company had configured. Their dialler said one thing, the passenger’s phone said another, and the second number belonged to the upstream carrier’s pool.

A passenger who was expecting a call from the airline’s official number and saw something unfamiliar had good reason to hang up. The number they had been told to trust was not the number on the screen.

Comparing what was sent with what arrived

The team started running test calls through each outbound route and comparing the number that arrived with the number they expected. Where the two matched, the route stayed. Where they didn’t, the route went on a watch list, and the carrier was asked to explain.

• Two routes were rewriting the presented number under certain conditions.
• One of them also added a spam label on a major caller ID app.
• Their escalation to the carrier included the expected number, the received number and a screenshot from the handset.

Ready before it’s needed

The routes are now tested weekly, not only after a disruption. When the next cancellation happened, the team knew which routes were safe and used only those. It was not a dramatic result, just calls being answered by people who recognised who was calling.

Industry: travel and aviation · Use case: disruption and rebooking outreach · Team: contact centre operations

If this is your team

When you have hours to reach every passenger on a cancelled flight, the number that arrives on their phone has to be the one they can recognise. Run a free caller ID check from a handset in each country you fly to and compare what displayed against what the dialler was told to present. A mismatch means a carrier on the route rewrote or dropped the caller ID, and no setting in your contact centre will fix that; the route has to change.

Keep a standing check on the published customer-service number too, so the inbound callback path still shows the airline name on Truecaller and Hiya when passengers ring back. Teams that have been through one bad disruption usually keep a weekly check running during the quiet months. The SIP reseller write-up covers the name side of the same problem.