I use a human travel agent for two reasons:

1. She gets me tickets I can't book online. For example, I'm looking at a trip to Australia on Virgin Australia. I want premium economy across the Pacific, but when I put that in, online sites also book internal Australia flights in business class at a much higher fare than I'd prefer to pay. She can get trans-Pac PE and domestic economy on one ticket. That saves me hundreds of dollars, and I don't have a separate-tickets, no-protection problem if anything goes wrong.

2. She solves problems. I returned to LAX from, coincidentally, Oz last August right into Delta's computer meltdown. The wait on the Gold Medallion phone line was 90 minutes. Airport service desk lines were longer than that. The line to the Sky Club was way out the door and they only let people in when someone else left. I called her. She got me the last seat on the only BOS-bound plane that took off that afternoon. Without her I would have been there for at least another day, perhaps two.

Either of these is well worth $35 per trip.