Originally Posted by
seawolf
I don’t see why not considering general public is able to travel/change without 3rd party agencies involve. Stats quoted up thread from ASTA/ARC is 40% of tickets are issued by travel agencies.
IME Holistically most trips don’t require changes in advance. Infrequent flyers tend to attend conferences where plans don’t really change. It will be outright cancel for credit.
Our sales/consultants have last minute changes and likely have status (with status I preferred to deal with airline than corp travel).
Even when I was previously flying enough for EXP the number of times I had to change in advance are rare. Number of times I actually called corp travel for change can be counted on one hand in past 10 years. More frequent are changes to earlier /standby or IROPs which took place at gate/lounge/airline call center.
Well I'm going to disagree with you about the need for changes and agency service, and we are NOT going to have high-paid employees wait on hold for agents. Can we have their administrative assistants do that? Perhaps, but that's also not really a good use of their time. I suspect booking another airline is the path of least resistance for the time being.