Do you go to a travel agent for your business or personal travel needs or do you prefer to handle it all yourself? Once upon a time, making flight reservations was infinitely simpler by going thru an agency unless you knew for a fact that a specific airline had a flight that met your needs. Same with hotel reservations, car rental, and all other travel related functions.
These days, an agent really isn’t needed for many (perhaps most) situations, at least, I don’t think they are. In fact, right now, my mom and I are working with an agent (a friend of hers) to plan a cruise later this summer. But most of what has been needed, we could easily have done ourselves as far as I’m concerned. I think my mom assumed we had to have an agent and I assumed her friend was going to hand us an entire package all neatly wrapped. Instead, I’ve had to do a lot of investigating myself, including telling the agent what flights we want and finding out some specifics about the cruise.
A friend from high school has retired and started a second career as a travel agent. Her FB posts are heavily on the side of self-promotion, which is fine, but honestly, I don’t see what she can do for me that I can’t do for myself. Is there something I’m missing? Are you a DIY traveler or do you let a pro handle it all for you?
I’ve done both and generally I prefer doing it myself. It takes more time but I have plenty of that. And this way I can check with DH and choose options that best suit the two of us and our traveling style. It saves a little extra money for the actual experience.
I keep myself signed in for airline tickets to places we want to fly to and check on that every day. But for a really planned vacation I start enough months ahead of time that I can review maps, hotels, restaurants, attractions and read reviews and vacationing forums (a must for me) so that by the time we get there I know the place about as well as is possible.
When we were both working it was easier to have our trusty Triple-First-Letter-of-the-Alphabet agent just do the works for us and hand it over.
I just got back from Costa Rica and we used a travel agent. That proved invaluable because the trip consisted of three people on different travel schedules and multiple destinations within Costa Rica. We also had to change some of the plans at the last minute and all that took was an e-mail to the agency. To arrange all of that ourselves would have been difficult if not impossible. The agent also picked out the best hotels, outings, rental car and gave suggestions about where to eat when we were driving between destinations.
I never use a travel agent for domestic travel but we were happy to have the skilled help in that case.
Oh, screw travel agents, I mean it, every last one!! I have been attempting to get help planning a trip to Europe that’s somewhat complicated, and when I tell them what I need, they halfheartedly send me to fixed tour websites or other useless things. No, I want a customized trip to our needs. And I am not talking cheap either-I think we’ll spend over $15K at least, but not one of them seems to be willing to do a damn thing.
For work I have to go through a travel agent, though it is all done on-line. Most large companies require this, because the site can enforce whatever restrictions they have and collect usage information to negotiate discounts with providers.
For leisure we use a travel agent only for cruises. She has better access to the list of available rooms and discounts than I’ve found on the web sites of the cruise company. We do all the research ourselves ahead of time, looking at ports, looking up the cruise on Cruise Critic, etc.
For business travel (only once in the past decade), gotta work through the officially sanctioned travel agent, period. Them’s the rules, even if you could get a better deal elsewhere.
For personal travel, if I’m interested in a destination and want to find out what’s worth doing there, I can ask about it here on the Dope, and I’ll get plenty of feedback. I can shop for and make air and hotel reservations myself. So where’s the part where I might need a travel agent?
Personal or individual work-related travel is always DIY these days, although I used to go to STA for flight reservations back in the good old days when I was eligible for student discounts.
I did use the university-affiliated travel agent when I was planning a student trip abroad; this is essentially required for group travel, and in any case it made the flight arrangements a hell of a lot easier. I handled pretty much everything else myself (hostels, tours, bus tickets), though.
I am a corporate travel agent for a huge company. Like others have said, many companies make their employees go through us. Some love it, some hate it. If you’re stuck at the airport because of a delay, we can usually beat the line. That and managing the corporate discounts and company travel policies are about the best things we have going for us.
Travel agents were necessary back when flights were published in timetables, and tickets were imprinted by hand or special printers, on special paper, but online timetables and etickets have changed that.
Very little of what I do absolutely MUST be done by a travel agent. Almost everything can be done by oneself online. But not everyone has time to stalk the forums, conduct multiple searches, learn about tariffs, and just generally do the work required to get the very best deal. A travel agent, after a while, starts to know that stuff and can save you money and effort and time. Though seriously, 30 minutes of searching will find you the lowest possible fares on any airline. The search engines’ prices are accurate for just about every domestic flight.
Personally, I would use a travel agent for a trip to Cuba, or any other structured international tour, and definitely a cruise. Everything else I would do myself online.
Why use an agent for a cruise? I surf a lot of cruise line sites (I can dream, yanno) and it all seems to be pretty straightforward. You can see where they’re going, when they’re going, what cabins are available and what they cost. You can arrange thru their sites for air reservations if necessary, for transfers to and from the ship, for trip insurance, and for side trips if you want them. The sites are also very specific regarding the documents you need for your cruise. I’m not sure what else one might need an agent for.
I booked a cruise for my husband, his folks, and me and it was pretty much a piece of cake. We’d been to the cruise terminal before - heck we were going on the same ship - and it was within driving distance, so no flights or transfers were necessary.
I can see using an agent to arrange for group travel - someone needs to herd the cats. And I suppose it can make everything easy: “We want to go to X and do Y and Z, but not W” then the agent sends you an itinerary and off you go. Personally, I enjoy the planning - sometimes even more than the trip.
my last trip was with two other people, one of whom is also an independent traveler and we found out that our travel styles and conflict resolution styles did not mix well at all. If I ever travel with a group of people again, I’m using a travel agent, or tour company, or some kind of other external organizing force to plan activities (and later to blame when things go wrong).
On my own, there would have to be an extreme reason to use one (countries that have weird visa requirements, very tricky logistics, etc.) but for most trips, I can do just as well on my own.
For work, I have to use an agent-- which is fine because timing matter for business travel and I don’t want to figure out all of the details. For personal travel, I’ve always done it myself. But my travel style is largely unplanned. Typically I reserve a flight and my first night or two of accommodations, and book the rest as I go along.
I am a Fancy Hands user, so I’ll often have them do the initial research. (Shameless plug: Fancy Hands is the best thing ever.!
The only reasons to use a travel agent for a cruise would be that there are sometimes discounts and packages available to travel agencies, and sometimes delightful little boutique companies, (like for shore excursions, and last I knew there are some great very small Asian and European river cruise companies) that don’t always show up on the bigger US travel search engines but market to and will make deals with agencies.
For some people too, traveling is stressful and confusing, and they want to be in a place but don’t want to deal with figuring out how to get there. That’s where an agent comes in handy.
And of course, we’re great scapegoats, or advocates, when something goes wrong. A good agent understands the significance of your trip of a lifetime, realizes that you are going to be way too tired and fraught to argue with the guy at the rental car counter in Pisa after your 18 hour flight, and will have the patience (and sometimes a little more clout) when problem solving is necessary.
Good advice. I’ve heard the same from others when going on extended vacations to places they’ve never been to before, usually outside of the country but not exclusively. I would pay extra for this. It appears to add a piece of mind factor in addition to someone you can contact if things go bad.
Agree with this. I can easily arrange a weekend in Toronto by myself (book my flight online, call my favourite Toronto hotel directly), but for anything business-related or more complicated than that, I’ll use a travel agent.
Most of my travel is to specific events. Because I know the date & location, & there is frequently an ‘official hotel’, I usually do it myself.
However, I was planning a kind of complicated European trip & wanted a travel agent’s help (I didn’t necessarily care where I stayed in some of the cities/countries, but wanted a good location/value & didn’t want to spend a lot of time researching). Travel agents, like people in any other industry, can range from excellent to awful so I didn’t want just anyone I randomly found & didn’t know anything about. The trouble was, everyone I asked for a recommendation says they do their own online. When I asked one of the admins at work, she gave me the name of the company we use but said she deals with whomever answers the 800 number, not anyone in particular. I ended up doing it on my own.
Our second to last cruise we were pretty late for, and we wanted a room for three. That wasn’t easy, and our travel agent dealt with it quite well. But we selected the ship and the itinerary and the shore excursions ourselves.
I haven’t been overseas for a while (last time, I used an agent), but for domestic flights, I go to one of those “we compare airlines and get the best deal for you” websites. However, I don’t quite understand their business model. They get a cheap deal then add their own hefty surchage. The reason I don’t understand the business model is that I assume most people do what I do: use them to find the flight number and ticketing options, then back the hell out of that website, go to the relevant airline’s one, and book direct.
I tried to find a travel agent for a trip to the US (from the UK) requiring multiple stopovers and multiple hotels; I wanted a travel agent because there was so much to organise that I would have been happy to pay a fee for someone to organise it. There was nobody available.
We have to use a travel agent at my work because they are a small business and we are trying to meet federal benchmarks to satisfy terms of our contract. Basically, I find an itinerary, tell them to book it, they slap on a fee and often as not, manage to screw it up.
