Service is her reward

Summer 1979. Diane Suarez has completed her studies at The Queens High School in Kingston. She is fluent in German and Spanish, having studied both languages up to ‘A’ Level, but the 18 year-old, like many young adults that age, isn’t quite clear on what she wants to do with the rest of her life.

So, she takes a guest relations officer job at Negril Beach Village, just over 150 miles away from her home in Kingston.

“I decided I wanted to just go into the hotel industry, so I went straight to Negril Beach Village and worked there for two years,” she tells All Woman.

“That was a great experience,” she says, given that she lived on the property and was in constant touch with the guests, particularly those from Germany, who would basically call on her at any time to sort out problems or issues they had, even though, as she puts it, hers was “a Monday to Friday type job”.

She probably didn’t realise it then, but the travel industry’s highly infectious lure was slowly capturing Suarez who, by then, was interacting regularly with travel agents and travel journalists.

“When I was in Negril, I met a few ladies who worked with Lufthansa in Germany and they kept saying to me, ‘you need to come to Germany to improve your working knowledge of the language’. So, I saved up a bit of money and after two years I said, ‘well, let me go to Europe… that was in 1981,” she explains.

Her initial plan was to have a long holiday, so she first visited a long-time penpal in England for six weeks before going to Germany.

“When I ought to have come home, there were some jobs going with Lufthansa and my friends asked me if I wasn’t going to apply.” She did, and ended up working with the German airline in Hannover, Germany for two years at the airport as a customer service agent.

That experience won her over and Diane Suarez, today Diane Corrie, British Airways’ country commercial manager in Jamaica, is all the better for it. So, too, is British Airways. For Corrie has worked at almost every level of the airline business and is proving a real asset to the British carrier.

“I started out as a reservations and ticketing agent, then I moved on to being the supervisor for that department,” she tells All Woman.

Her next job was as a business executive, dealing mostly with sales support type functions — preparing revenue reports, forward bookings… those sorts of things.

The airline obviously recognised her talent and appointed her sales manager before naming her country commercial manager in November 1999 after Dawn Weller, the first ever local manager appointed, retired.

“Diane brings a lot to British Airways in terms of how she communicates,” says Charmaine Harrison, managing director of Great Vacations. “She’s extremely professional, an excellent communicator and very good person to work with.”

Thelma Shaw, senior travel consultant at Total Travel, who says she has been working with Corrie for the past 17 years, was equally flattering in her comments. “She’s a very pleasant person. Very helpful, very knowledgeable and very efficient. I have been dealing with her since she was in reservations and find her a lovely person to deal with.”

According to Shaw, Corrie displays all the qualities of a true professional who knows what it means to provide true customer service. Said Shaw: “Diane will always return your calls. She has never called one day and not asked how your children… your family are doing. Everyone here (at Total Travel), from junior to senior level staff, have nothing but praise for her.”

Corrie obviously treasures that bond she has with local travel agents, for she equates it with the satisfaction she gets from achieving high sales and, she says, the rapport she enjoys with her customers.

“…that’s a very rewarding part of the job… the satisfaction when we manage to achieve very good results and being recognised for it, but moreso for the kind of relationships we have built with our customers, suppliers and travel agents over the years,” says Corrie, who started working with British Airways in 1985 after a two-year stint with AJAS.

She admits that some people are surprised that she has stayed with the airline so long, but Corrie says that BA is a good company to work for, and, simply, she enjoys what she’s doing.

“I’m still here because I really do enjoy my job. It is a good company to work for… They’re very demanding, you have to work hard, but no two days are the same, no matter what job you do,” she says.

While the travel benefits that go with the job are attractive, Corrie says she relishes the “never ending” training that all BA staff must undergo.

“BA is a big believer in investment in training. If you were to ask me how many courses I’ve been on, I’ve lost count. For every year, you go on at least two.”

But, equally as exciting to Corrie is the opportunity a small station like Jamaica offers her to, as she puts it, “wear many hats”.

“BA is a very large company internationally (therefore) our local operation would probably be considered quite small. So, as a manager, in a way it’s very good because you get to touch on many different aspects of the business that maybe my counterparts in the bigger stations would not.”

Among them, she says, are finance, human resources and operations at the airport. “…the airport managers don’t report to me, but I’m very much aware of what’s happening at the airport. I’ll always be kept involved,” she explains.

Ostensibly, though, Corrie’s primary role is to drive British Airways’ sales in Jamaica. And so far, with her small team of 10 persons at their office in the Towers on Dominica Drive, New Kingston, she seems to be doing a good job.

For instance, she says, the slump in air travel sparked by the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States had little effect on BA’s yields out of Jamaica.

Corrie declined politely to give figures to support her claim, but said: “I cannot complain at all. Flights are full. October, November which traditionally are soft, the flights have been full. The few times when they’ve left not full, we’re talking about a few empty seats. So I have to thank the travel agents for that support.

“Immediately after September 11, we had a few cancellations, not a lot, people who may have been going to meetings that were cancelled. We had a few people going to the Middle East who, for obvious reasons, didn’t want to go there.”

Corrie also points to the station’s winning BA’s top sales award for Latin America and the Caribbean in 1998 and 1999 as further proof of their achievement, and says each year Jamaica has been highly commended for producing good revenue results in what many acknowledge to be a challenging environment.

But Corrie, it appears, thrives on challenges, for she has managed to run a tight ship while playing mother and wife.

Each morning at her Red Hills home, the alarm rings at 6 o’clock. “Somebody looking on will say it’s a military drill because everything has to be done in a certain amount of time — get up, get ready, breakfast, out of there by about 7:15.”

She takes her two sons — Alexander, 8, and Dane, 7 — to school and is in her office by 8:30.

“Usually I deal with the e-mails first, because a lot of the time they may involve some correspondence with head office in London,” she explains, pointing to her laptop open on her uncluttered desk.

She then calls BA’s other station managers in the Caribbean; sometimes sets up a conference meeting with their boss; then meets with her account manager who updates her on what’s happening with the travel agents; checks her telephone sales; sometimes meets with clients; then talks to the airport on the days when they have flights; after which she will do her letters and check her forward bookings.

The job, Corrie says, takes her travelling once, sometimes twice a month, mostly to BA’s regional head office in Miami, or to other Caribbean islands, and she is required to be in London “probably four times a year”. She also spends a lot of time in discussion with people, and although office hours end officially at 4:30 pm, she usually spends a few more hours at her desk.

What time then, for her family?

“Prior to having a laptop I would stay until eight o’clock,” she says. “But now, because I travel so much on the job, I really try not to be in the office late.” The laptop comes in handy at home after she’s spent quality time with the boys and her husband, Rickey, without whom, she says, she would never be able to cope.

“I have a really wonderful husband. He gives me a lot of support and encouragement,” Corrie says and adds that her parents, both semi-retired, also help by picking up the boys from school and extra -curricular activities. “So, when I have to pick up and go off on these trips, there is no worry, no concern, because everybody helps out.”

But when she does get free time to spend with her family, nothing pleases Corrie better than to travel with them around Jamaica. If that’s not possible, though, she’ll be just happy to go to the beach or a movie, or read a book.