PROPERTY

Above, Beyond And By Your Side: When Destination Services Are A Lifeline For Expats

Imagine you have just arrived at JFK International Airport. You’ve taken on a new role at work, and the company has arranged to relocate you and your family to the United States. It’s already late by the time you get through customs, collect all your luggage and take a car service to your short-term accommodations, only to find that the night clerk has no record of your reservation and no vacancies.

What Do You Do?

Who Do You Call?

If your company has engaged a Destination Service Provider, you call your designated consultant from the Settling-In Services team. Because this is the person you have engaged with the most up to this point, she knows your family. Because she is always available to you - literally at any time of the day or night - you know she will answer. And because your consultant knows the last thing you want to do is check into a hotel, possibly for days on end, she dispatches her husband to collect you and your family and bring you all back to their home to stay while she gets everything sorted out.

The scenario described above is a true story. There’s above-and-beyond. There’s going the extra mile. Then there is what a Destination Services Provider does.

Whether you are relocating to the US, the UK or anywhere else around the world, destination services can be a lifeline for expats like you. Yes, they help with getting your Social Security, bank account, driver’s license, ID cards and all those legalities, but the real service really shines when it comes to managing the many inevitable vagaries of life in a foreign country.

Just ask my colleague Francesca Ferraiolo. As Director, Destination Services, Francesca manages a team of settling-in consultants with a tremendous capacity for empathy and a talent for handling unexpected hiccups.

“The first thing to understand is that there is no such thing as ‘standard’ destination services,” she said. “Everything is customised to the assignee’s experience”. Francesca has no shortage of anecdotes like the one about the consultant who welcomed the assignee and family into her home.

There’s the team member who excused himself from his family’s Christmas Eve celebration in order to serve as a witness and celebrant of an assignee’s hastily arranged nuptials at City Hall.

There’s the time Francesca herself negotiated the sale of an assignee’s car - for as much as $15,000 more than he might’ve gotten otherwise - or helped to save another assignee’s life by finding her a hospital to address acute abdominal pain that turned out to be appendicitis.

“Assignees often have personal issues that they don’t want to raise with their human resources department”, she explained. “They come to us because, in many ways, we are their first friends in a strange country. We’re like extended family that they can trust”.

Beyond her 20-plus years of working in relocation, Francesca has first-hand experience with what it feels like to be a stranger in a strange land. She was seven years old when she moved with her family from their native Calabria, in the south of Italy, to Connecticut.

In fact, all the consultants on our team have had similar experiences. Many of them have lived all over the world and speak multiple languages, and all of them know the power in simple acts of kindness to ease the hardships of adapting to an unfamiliar culture. This is true for most DSP’s.

When Francesca recounts all the stories about the ways our consultants go above and beyond, people often ask, why? Why be on-call 24/7 and go to such great lengths?

The simple answer is that this is the business value a DSP offers: we do everything we do to make the experience a success, and the more we make it a success, the more our client companies will hear from their employees that we are destination service rock stars.

But there’s also another reason: It’s the right thing to do.

By Christine Haney, Executive Vice President, Global Relocation and Referral Services, Douglas Elliman