Here are the strangest things that personal travel managers have been asked:

• I had a precious female client who requested that she be placed in a room with no green. How do you go through life if you can’t handle the colour green? The hotel had to take all soft furnishings that had any shade of green out of the room … luckily none of the fixtures were green.
• A client left his wallet in the room of a colleague’s after some fun in the night. He called me requesting I contact the hotel to get it collected for him to pick up from reception.
• A client wanted to stay at a casino in Las Vegas that has slot machines in the male toilets. I couldn’t satisfy this request as casino rules state there must be cameras on all gaming machines and of course, no cameras are allowed in bathrooms.
• I once had a client that was doing a Kimberley cruise as a single passenger but wanted to share with a stranger. She came to me with a list of conditions for the potential stranger, one of which asked for the stranger to have been tested for HIV and other infectious diseases and nail fungus. Others included a requirement for not snoring and not being flirtatious.
• I had a client ask me to have everyone searched for peanuts before they got on the plane from Sydney to Los Angeles so that she could not worry so much about dying on the plane if she had a reaction! She seriously wanted every passenger and crew to be strip searched before she would get on! After much counselling, I managed to talk her into driving her own car to the Gold Coast and having a break up there! Bless her!
• A client rang wanting to do a cruise with a nice pool. One that doesn’t show any singles on it and one that allowed his wife to go topless. Yes that’s right, it turned out he wanted me to book him a Swingers Cruise.
• A client asked if I could please find out the specific types of spiders that lived on the tropical island they were visiting. Specifically, were there any Golden Orb spiders?
• How many pairs of shoes can I take with me? (This was from a 60-year-old bandanna-wearing man.)
• I received a request from a client to drive his Mercedes SL500 for eight weeks while he was on holidays and take it for its regular service. As a good agent, I kindly accepted!
• I had a male client ask how many pairs of underwear should he get his wife to pack for him!
• I answer the phone to a new inquiry … ‘I would like to send my child unaccompanied to Montevideo’. I explained that on the particular route there are some planes changes and that it could be tricky, asked the ‘mum’ how old was the minor. She answered, five months! When I informed her that it was not possible, her response was, don’t the airhostesses take care of them?
• I had a young first time mum travelling back to the States with her new baby and she asked whether she should buy earplugs for the other passengers around her so if her baby cries they aren’t disturbed with the baby’s crying.