Not quite the same but I used to be an admin for a branch of a fairly big estate agents.
If a client came in, buyer or seller, and their usual person was not there to help them, we would have been in a lot of trouble if we didn't offer them the same level of polite and friendly service.
It might have meant spending time with a client who you weren't going to be paid any commission for, but it all evened out in the end when other people helped your client for you in return.
And if someone's poor attitude lost a client for someone else, that would not have gone down well.
I don't blame you for leaving and going elsewhere. Why should you beg them to take your money? I can't understand firms who think like this these days, there's so much competition for everything, you'd think they'd be glad for the business, even near closing time.
We had some shocking service from a funeral director when we wanted to buy a marble vase for our children's grave. We went with the Co-operative Funeralcare because they had dealt with most of the other family funerals, saw a lovely woman in a private room. She was very sensitive, talked through our options, the costs and the legalities, and sent us away with a brochure to make our decision.
We made an appointment to go back and see her to finalise and pay for our choice, which was an expensive and unusual piece.
She was running late. So while we waited in reception one of their other people decided to shout over to us to ask why we were there, what we wanted, what we had chosen, who it was for, and demanded to know why we thought we could just stick a vase on the ground without the proper paperwork. Then he started a discussion with a woman who had been listening about what her family did when her uncle died and how her choice of black marble was better than our choice of white marble.
He only stopped when I started crying, and then he left the desk and went into the back office. Didn't show his face again until we left.
I wish we had left straight away, but we were still reeling a bit from needing to be there at all, and the woman we were supposed to be seeing arrived just as we were getting up to go. By then her colleague was hiding in the back room. I still wish we'd gone elsewhere and ordered something else now, rather than give our money to people who treated us so badly.
The woman in the travel agent has done herself no favours. She's lost business for her company and commission for her colleague. She might think she wasn't gaining anything for herself and hasn't personally lost out but if they all have this attitude to clients who come in late in the day or who have previously spoken to someone else in the branch they will keep losing customers and in the long run that could mean they all lose their jobs, or at least not be as profitable for the company and so less able to negotiate better pay for themselves etc.
I hope you enjoy your holiday, wherever you book it.