Now Travelers Can Get Help Around the Clock : Trends: These 24-hour services allow citizens traveling abroad to call home toll-free in case of an emergency. They’re free to clients of travel agencies that subscribe.

A traveler in Singapore wanted to leave a very important message for his wife about changes in his itinerary. But it was the middle of the night back home in Los Angeles and he had to run to the airport to catch a flight.

A man suffered a heart attack while vacationing in Nafplion, Greece. His wife took him to a hospital very late at night, but the attending doctor didn’t speak English.

Through a reservations snafu, a family of four visiting from the United States found that it didn’t have a room at a Zurich hotel despite holding written confirmation. Moreover, the hotel wasn’t offering to help them find alternate lodging.

In each of these cases, travelers were helped by a Woodland Hills-based service called Reservation Center, which is one of a growing number of companies that specialize in handling various travel-related problems 24 hours a day, free of charge, for clients of travel agencies that subscribe to the service.

The major benefit of companies such as Reservation Center is in helping travelers with last-minute itinerary changes or problems related to off-hour reservations--whether with airlines, hotels, cruise ships or rental cars. Other services offered include language translation, relaying telephone messages in a person’s own voice, helping airlines trace lost luggage, and providing vital document information on items that may be lost, such as passports, visas and credit cards.

In effect, these companies serve as 24-hour travel agencies while consumers travel abroad. Most offer toll-free telephone service from many foreign countries, which could amount to major savings.

“Many travelers like the safety-net aspect of this service. It’s a comfort factor,” said Sue Boucher, manager of Los Angeles-based Ferguson-Gates Travel, which subscribes to a 24-hour help service called Thor24.

The only catch for consumers, of course, is that you have to choose a travel agency that uses one of the 24-hour services. Typically, that means a travel agency which handles a large amount of business-related travel.

According to John Baker, president of Thor24, which operates out of Boulder, Colo., about 20% of the approximately 37,000 travel agencies nationwide offer some kind of 24-hour service.

“And the number keeps growing,” said Baker, “since any agency that wants to get--or keep--business travel accounts can’t compete in today’s market without offering a 24-hour service.”

The companies are paid by travel agencies, not consumers. “When we began, this was a service that travel agencies utilized primarily for business travelers, but now we’re being used more and more by leisure travelers,” said Jerry Goldberg, chief operating officer of Reservation Center, which was one of the first services available when it started 15 years ago.

Reservation Center provides travelers with a card that lists the 58 countries where the toll-free phone service can be utilized, as well as a language interpretation card that has the statement, “I will get an interpreter on the telephone,” in 134 languages and dialects.

Goldberg estimates that 300 travel agencies in Southern California subscribe to his company’s service.

And now the happy endings to the above stories:

--The Singapore traveler made a quick call via Reservation Center’s toll-free number and left a voice-mail message for his wife. “We then contacted the traveler’s travel agency as soon as they opened, and they phoned their client’s wife, who called us,” explained Goldberg. “All we had to do was push a button and she was listening to her husband’s own voice. That way there’s no mistake, since you’re not depending on someone else taking a message and possibly getting things garbled.”

--The wife in Nafplion pointed to “Greek” on her language interpretation card, the doctor nodded and she immediately called Reservation Center’s toll-free number for Greece. Said Goldberg: “Our supervisor on duty plugged her call into the language interpreter service that we use and they had a Greek-speaking interpreter on the line in less than a minute. The interpreter served as a go-between to have the doctor’s questions answered, and the man was subsequently treated and stabilized.”

--The Zurich hotel mix-up was resolved when a Reservation Center representative made several calls and was able to find a comparable hotel for the family. “Often a hotel that can’t provide a room to a guest in this kind of situation will help the traveler find another room, but this hotel was unsympathetic,” Goldberg said.

“While the consumer was still on the phone, we made some calls and got the family a room at another hotel. This was, of course, a free call to us. The consumer would have had to pay to call his travel agency, and they couldn’t have done anything at that time since it was the middle of the night in the United States.”