Who’s Taking Care of Avianca? - The Life of a Hotel Doctor

Coris, a travel insurer, mostly for Latin Americans, sent me to the Crowne Plaza to care for a Spanish lady with stuffy ears. She turned out to be a flight attendant for Avianca airlines. Airline crew can't fly if they suffer a host of minor ailments, so they provide plenty of easy visits.

That evening a call arrived from Traveler's Aid, an American national housecall service, and I returned to the Crowne Plaza. The guest, a Columbian man with a cold, was also an Avianca flight attendant.

That was puzzling. Foreign airlines once called me directly to see their crew. They don't do that today. They call a more traditional provider organization who then calls me.

But what was Avianca doing? I theorized that it sometimes calls Coris, and the Coris dispatcher consults her list for Los Angeles. If she decides to call me, Avianca will pay Coris perhaps double my charge. If the dispatcher calls Traveler's Aid, the additional middleman will increase the cost it still more.

I've long since stopped trying to see the logic.