I used to own part of a travel agency in the 90's. I got out when the airlines began removing commissions.

As an agent, having access to a fully-enabled (professional) computerized reservation system (CRS), such as Sabre, will basically provide you with the displays you see on ExpertFlyer plus the ability to book from those displays. It is most useful if you want to play with different inventory buckets on a given itinerary. For example, you book a three leg itinerary and decide you want the first leg priced in A, the second leg in Y, the final leg in V. That's no problem. Then you want to see the lowest fare regardless of bucket; just a couple of keystrokes and you can see it. Then you decide you want to price the itinerary with just legs 1 and 2; no problem. Basically, you can build itineraries, price them with any combination of inventory bucket, and do so quite efficiently.

To my knowledge, there is no way to do this with online booking engines. The first thing any consumer online engine wants to know is whether you're going coach or first, and then it applies that decision to every leg. There's no way to pick and choose class or inventory for different legs. Most of the time that doesn't matter, but at times it is very important.

So, this type of information can be quite useful and efficient.

The other advantage that agencies used to have, but which has been sharply curtailed with the advent of electronic tickets, is that you could book and ticket an itinerary and then you had until the following Monday to Void the transaction. That was nice. Nowadays, I think the window for voids is much more narrow (although I don't know exactly what it is).

As far as finding "deals", I think you would be disappointed with agent life. With the internet being what it is, there is no better place to find "deals" on travel, if that is your primary goal. The agency information systems are not as good as an Orbitz fare search when it comes to airfare pricing, if your paramount goal is the lowest fare. I would never get into the agent business for the "deals". As far as travel perks, you will get the occasional free room somewhere, but it is almost always going to be during low season. You will sometimes get agent rates at hotels, which can save some real money. The airlines will give you nothing (back in the day, some airlines would upgrade agents at the gate; that's no longer the case). With car rentals, you'll get 20% off. And then there are the "fam" trips where a tour company will invite agents to a resort to familiarize them with it so they can sell it. On the surface, those appear nice, but then you end up with a group of 30 other travel agents having to tour these properties, which may or may not be your cup of tea. Personally, I would rather pay my own way and go on my own schedule.

As far as your friend goes, she's not really getting "kickbacks." She's getting a cut of the commission, which has always been the way that outside (non-employee) agents are compensated. And I have no idea what she means by "getting a jump on reservations."