It seems that with the exception of those who work in large companies and deal with either the in-house travel coordinator or a contracted travel agent, few of us here use travel agents. I'd like to find out why you either don't, or do. Has online booking anything to do with it? Do you find you often know more than the travel agent on the other end of the phone? Have TAs become anachronisms for regular FFers?

Operating a small business, I do most of my own bookings, either on line or with the elite desk of the airline or hotel or rental company. On occasions when I need a more complex ticket, I will use a TA.

Shareholder, I almost never use a TA. I think I do more careful research and come up with the arrangements I want nearly every time. Plus, there are so many more experienced travelers (especially) here and elsewhere on the net who give such helpful advice.

The few times in the past that I used a TA mistakes were made. Like flying our entire office to a meeting a day early. Or the cruise agent who promised upgradeable airline tickets and the moon. That was a horrible experience for many other reasons.

Also, have attempted to use Best Fares TAs several times. They came thru once for some last minute Christmas travel to Florida at a huge savings on TWA. The rest of the times I called at an hour before closing and I would sit on hold til closing and the line would ring busy. Some service!

All these and more soured me on TAs. I would think that many would give worse service than ever before now that their commissions have been cut so much. Surely there are some great ones still out there. I just have more confidence in myself than trusting it to a TA. I don't know near as much as a qualified TA, but I am willing to put in the time to try and cover all my bases.

I will say that I did a mileage run recently with a complicated routing and did use a TA who was recommended by another FT'r and it was perfect. Thankyou, you know who you are! I couldn't do it on my own.

Also, I definitely love the online booking bonuses! Who here doesn't? Hope this one opinion helps!

There are many benefits to using a TA.. and, as much as I love online travel booking.. there are some discounts and deals that are available to TAs that I simply cannot access. Maybe it means I have to learn SABRE or something.. but for stuff like booking travel ex-Asia, some TAs have access to fares that are available to Asian residents only.. and so on. I would also recommend TAs for some vacation packages, cruises, and consolidator airfares for certain destinations (Africa, India). One time I tried to look at fares to Lagos, Nigeria.. and Expedia didn't even recognize the airport code !

About a year ago I just finished working 2 1/2 years for a company that required each and every reservation, car, plane, hotel, train, etc to be done through the inhouse agent. I hated it.

You would hand them the request from point A to point B. They would come back with some insane price at times that didn't make any sense, I would go on line, get what they wanted $1,200 for down to $350 on my airline of choice, print out the details, and hand it to them for them to book my trips.

I always thought I should get half the difference, but it was never seen that way. So yes, we used an agent, I hated it.

Using a TA for domestic travel? Almost never. However, some can definitely come in handy for international flights, especially consolidators. They can indeed get you fares that you really can't get yourself. Compared with published fares -- these can be HUGE savings.

Although there are exceptions to every rule -- I have rather unpleasant memories with Council Travel when I was in college. I needed to get to BKK, and each time I asked for a fare quote, it would literally take 30 minutes of typing on the other end of the line before I would get any sort of response. And the routing they suggested? SFO-NRT-ITM (Osaka Itami), spend the night, KIX (Osaka Kansai)-HND (Tokyo Haneda)-transfer to NRT within 1.5 hours - BKK. Could we skip the whole Osaka round-trip and just stay in Tokyo? No. Can we earn miles? No. It wasn't even that much cheaper. Thanks, but no thanks.

I regularly use a travel agent who was a former sales rep for one of the major carriers.

Some of his best customers always purchase first class tickets, and oftentimes can't be bothered with SWUs so they give them to him and he helps out with upgrades for other good customers, like yours truly.

He always has a drawerful of discount certificates for air and hotel. When encountering problems with capacity controls for upgrades and award tickets, on many occasions his former colleagues in inventory control have been able to open up one or two more seats for me.

If I am unable to upgrade, he provides me with drink coupons. If another travel agency has a contract fare which is cheaper than what he is able to offer, he will go to that agency and, with my approval, go ahead and purchase it.

If I am on the road and subsequent flights are cancelled, he will call the carrier's help line and do everything possible to ensure that I am protected even if it means booking a seat on another carrier, with upgrades intact most of the time. He then faxes my new itinerary to my hotel.

I will forego all the on-line bonuses for the services that this travel agent provides.

Shareholder -

I see no value in them. I occassionally call my corp.TA just to check the fares I am finding online and I usually am doing better and NEVER worse. Things like bonus miles or in SW's case, a 50% reduction in the amount of flights needed to earn a free roundtrip,for online booking,got me looking at websites. What kept me was the speed and convenience of booking online. TA's aren't open at midnight and they usually can't book award tix. Websites can. Add to this the savings and it becomes a very desireable way to book travel.

If I needed a package trip to China, I might use one but I would never book a package trip I always plan my own itineraries, even when going abroad.I hear they are typically good with cruises but I find it hard to believe they could do better than the internet.

I think they have great value for the in-frequent traveller but I question their value to the type of people in this forum.

Very true!!! I have a great TA who has become a good friend of mine now. I always check any rates I've got w/hers.

She can almost always beat the rates I get at Hilton.com, expedia, travelocity etc. etc. for my Hilton stays.

......

Go back several years and I would say yeah, use the agent. Even then I was into finding the info myself, but hey, the agent didn't cost any extra, so I'd give them the business, and they'd make a connection and double-check that I didn't miss some better deal somewhere. Pretty win-win. I learned more and more tricks as time went on.

Now in these days of fees to book a ticket with TA, I don't bother to use one. The corporate-oriented agency I used to use still contacts me from time to time. They may still offer no fee if you book on their website (they're an Apollo shop, and their site is typical ITN/Apollo/Galileo/whatever-based). Booking on their site still gets you into their reservation-checking system, which is pretty slick. But I miss the old days of full-service.

I actually think I would *make* a good TA myself, but there's no future in that business it seems anymore. I curse the ridiculousness of some fares and such as much as the next guy, but in reality I enjoy the challenge of finding that best deal for every situation. Ah, well.

There remain probably a few genuine reasons to call a TA. Cruise specialists, perhaps. Consolidators that sell only to TAs, maybe, if they still exist. It's difficult to pick out things anymore, though. In this day of lots of info on the web, there's really little extra a TA can offer to an already-savvy traveler. I should say a *typical* FA. There are exceptions such as the one FTraveler mentions.

There seems to be a general feeling that TAs don't do much or spend very much time looking for the lowest fares. So isn't this the consequence of the airlines cutting back commissions? Forget what the commission limit is now, but it was pretty low, like 5% or max $50?

p.s. I agree I could do as well or better myself, but have to use the corporate desigated agency.

I have seldom had a travel agent whose fares I couldn't reduce by knowing more about the fare rules than they did. A number of times I've had difficulty getting things booked the way I want because the travel agent made (incorrect) assumptions based on not understanding the fare rules. Then there are all those times when travel agents entered frequent flyer number incorrectly (or not at all), causing me even more work.

Travel agents are great for the person who flies once per year and has no idea what to do, or someone who values their time far higher than the money they'll lose using one. For those of us who have any clue, travel agents are, mostly, a waste of money.

The one exception for me is that most online systems will not discount RTW fares, or even allow them to be booked. This pretty much forces you to use an airline directly, at full published price, or find a travel agent who'll do it cheaper.

Under normal circumstances, I'll try to use TA as much as possible. There are very few occasions that I'll buy online but unless there is somekind of online promotions, it's unlikely I'll buy directly from airlines.

I guess it depends on your needs. My travel is almost exclusively with Air Canada these days to Asia (Japan, China and occasionally, Taiwan). For that, a TA is necessary because the published fare is like twice more expensive than what TA can offer. For example, a return trip from Montreal, Canada to Shanghai, China (discounted economy but upgradeable V class)would be priced @ $2580 CAD or $1612.5 USD would only cost $1290 CAD or $806.25 USD through a TA for the exact same fare class. Furthermore, these fares are surprisingly flexible - more than you would expect from a ticket normally associated with this fare. For example, some of the restrictions such as no stopover or minimum stay or 7 day advance purchase don't seem to apply and flights can be changed provided that the booking class is available. I believe you can't do that with the exact same fare if you book with the airline directly. Don't ask me why, I don't know.

Secondly, I haven't paid for a flight wholly within North-America for almost 2 years now -only award travels because of AC not permitting upgrades from seat sales fares. Nevertheless, if I do, I will also book through a TA just because with one of my credit card, I get 5% cash back on the value of the ticket I buy with any airlines. I got an extra 1% discount for using the card. So for example, the total value of my ticket is $1000. I'll get $50 back (as credit to my card) + my total purchase will earn a 1% dividend. In other words, the dividends worth $10. The total deduction is $60, which means I actually pay $940 for a ticket priced at $1000. That might not seem much but since it applies to all classes of services and all airlines so if I buy a ticket at the price of $20,000, I actually get $1,200 back, not bad at all. For that, I have to go through the special travel agency associated with my card which happened to have its office in Montreal so I usually pass by to pick up tickets.

Finally, for the purpose of keeping good contacts with other people, if I can give other people chances of making money, I'll do it. I mean I don't pay extra if I book through a TA but TA earns up to 5% of commission for booking for me. I see that as important and valuable because I regard this as an intangible asset that I am cultivating - building good relationship network.

[This message has been edited by Guava (edited 11-15-2001).]

Guava, Just wondering what credit card you are using and the TA. I am aware of TD Travel Gold with the 5% rebate but not the 1%.
When you buy the discounted economy tickets are they in V class or another booking class? Although in my case as I'm only an Elite I can only upgrade from Y or M. Have you had any luck buying discounted Y or M fares?

Haven't used a TA in years. Punki is our corporate TA, or if she's busy, I book my own. The one good TA that I last used was very good until the internet started biting into his business and the last time I called him, the phone just rang and rang.