For flights within North America, I NEVER use a travel agent. I always book it online or call the airline directly (if a complex routing is involved). Since commisions are so low, I might risk getting charged a booking fee of say $15/ticket by my travel agent.

However, for international flights (especially those to Asia), I ALWAYS use a travel agent (I use a Chinese travel agent for flights to Asia, and an East Indian agent for flights to India).

One Chinese travel agent in Vancouver CANADA claimed that although she aknowledges that the airlines are making life harder for them by cutting commisions and imposing caps, she says that since they are an agent with a well defined "Target Market" (which are the Asian people) they often get good deals on airfares to Asia (contract fares, commision overrides that can be like 20-30% [no caps, so they can give back some to the customer]) from both North American and Asian airlines. She agrees that "it is not as good as it used to be", but says that the agency can still survive as they have repeat cutomers (mostly asian, or caucasian people who go to Asia often and probably had asian friends who referred them or were brave enough to walk in).

The travel agency's owner sometimes even go for "dim sum" with the sales representative from one of the Asian airline and build up good "guan xi" (or relationship) in hopes of getting good contracts.

Also, she says that "it is the WHITE CAUCASIAN travel agents who are suffering more because some of them only sell 'published fares' within North America, or those special $499 published fares to Europe with 5% commision and caps like $50 or even $20 per ticket, and occasional 'all inclusive' package to the Carribean." (Note: I don't mean to be racist, but this is what I heard from an agent).

[This message has been edited by daniellam (edited 11-16-2001).]