Imagine being trapped in an airport for a night. Or stuck at a standstill on the highway for hours. Or having your cruise ship turn back and evacuated.

Travel can already be tough enough for many people, but a natural disaster can change everything for even the simplest of travel plans. When this happens, travelers are left scrambling to get to safety, and that's where travel agencies like Global Excellence Travel in Warwick come in.

Janice Constantine, a travel agent for the Warwick agency, had to deal with the historic last month of hurricanes on the eastern seaboard.

"It was a constant barrage of the hurricanes that completely crippled the eastern part of the country and down between the islands," Constantine said. "It started with Houston where I had a client stuck in the airport."

She said her client wasn't stuck at the airport for too long, but after hurricane Harvey hit Houston like a freight train, just being able to make it out was an accomplishment.

Then hurricane Irma came up through the Caribbean and blasted into Florida.

"Florida was very, very serious because we had a lot of people not only traveling to and from the airport but now they're trying to get out of Florida by vehicle," said Constantine. "Trying to get hotels for them to stay in and car rentals for them was very frustrating."

Millions of people in Florida, including a few of her clients, were forced to evacuate all areas of the panhandle state because of the massive storm. Global Excellency was left with a "juggling act," according to Constantine, of making sure their clients had safe and affordable ways to get out of harm's way. Flights were cancelled en masse and everything from rental cars to hotel rooms were all booked up as people tried to evacuate.

"There's lots of switching around and protecting our clients involved," she said.

Vacationers on cruise ships were also impacted by the storms, for obvious reasons.

"Lots of cruise ships go in and out of Florida," Constantine said. "Some of the cruise ships were still out when the storm hit. It was a juggling act. It was very difficult and now we still have islands that are completely closed."

Cruise ship vacationers were brought back to port and flown back home because the hurricanes basically wiped out half the islands in the Caribbean, never mind the swells and rough sea that made boat travel impossible.

With all these cancellations and change in travel plans, the financial impact becomes of big concern as well. Luckily for travelers, Constantine said there haven't been too many problems in that regard.

"Airlines have been very good about refunds or re-accommodating travelers, and cruise ships have been the same way," she said.

Constantine also iterated how helpful travel agencies are in a time like this, saying that agents can "jump right on" issues and address them right away, unlike airlines or cruise companies.

"We're usually a lot more accessible," she said.

The travel agency knows that the hurricane's impact of travelers can't be understated, but Constantine did say that there haven't been any "horror stories" for any of clients, fortunately.

It'll be a battle for affected cities to recover from the storms, with tourism near the end of any priority list, but travelers on the East coast will certainly remember September 2017 as the month of the hurricanes.