Vacation planning
You are at a travel agency discussing your dream vacation. The agent is helpful but keeps suggesting expensive upgrades.
A beginner-level session of about 5 minutes.
The agent is friendly, and that is the difficulty. Nobody is pressuring you; you are being helped — the better room, the shorter flight, the package with transfers included — and each suggestion is reasonable on its own. Saying no the first time costs nothing. Saying it a third time, to someone who has been nothing but pleasant, is the one that takes something out of you, and it is where a comfortable budget quietly becomes an uncomfortable one. What helps is putting your limit into the room early, so later options are measured against a number rather than against how good they sound. Which of these upgrades would you still want if the price were quoted as a total?
Angles worth taking
- Give your number early and as a ceiling, because a vague budget invites the expensive version first by default.
- When an upgrade is priced as a small daily difference, ask for the full total before you react.
- Ask what changes between the two packages apart from price; often it is one thing you do not care about.
- A pleasant refusal can be repeated unchanged, while inventing a new reason each time makes it sound negotiable.
Who is in the room
You play
A budget-conscious traveler planning a holiday
You speak with
A friendly travel agent trying to upsell packages
Phrases to reach for
These are shown to you before the session starts. They are what you are asked to use, not a list the scorer is checking off.
Ready to speak?
Free to start. You need a TalkDrill account to speak — reading this page does not.
Browse all roleplay scenariosThe format
Modes
Learn (guided) · Mock (exam-real)
How a roleplay session works
Read your brief
Your role, the situation, and what a good outcome looks like. The counterpart has their own brief, and you do not get to read it.
Open the conversation
You speak first in most scenarios. How you open sets what you can ask for later, which is most of the exercise.
Handle the turn
Somewhere in the middle it stops going your way — a refusal, a counter-offer, a rebuttal you did not prepare for. That moment is the scenario.
Read the report
Outcome, the phrases you used and the ones you missed, fluency and clarity, and the specific line worth rewriting.
What you're scored on
Across every roleplay, the report looks at the same four things — because they are what makes a real conversation work or fail.
Book a trip within your budget while getting the best deal.
Task outcome
Whether you got what the brief asked for: the refund, the extension, the concession, the point conceded.
Appropriacy
Whether the register fits. A complaint that is too soft gets nothing; the same complaint too hard gets a manager and no refund.
Recovery
What you do with the unexpected turn — repair, rephrase, push back, or stall. This is where most of the marks move.
Delivery
Fluency, pronunciation and pace, judged in conversation rather than in a prepared monologue.
More roleplay scenarios
All roleplay scenarios · Travel scenarios · All speaking practice