The Importance of Travel Agents
Welcome to the internet age. You can now buy a condo, meet your future spouse, learn how to hotwire a car, blog incessantly about your travels, and probably save the world all while still in your pajamas and happy bunny toe socks. You can also book your next vacation all by yourself. But just because you can, should you? Despite having the universe at your fingertips, there is still reason to go to your local Travel Agent and get them to do the work for you.
I’m not just saying this because I am one (okay, that’s a teensy part of it), but Travel Agents are still important assets. We really do have a wealth of information that you’re never going to find online – we talk about popular destinations on a daily basis and/or have probably been there (most tourism offices go to great lengths to get agents to visit so they can better sell their destination). Even if we haven’t visited ourselves, we probably know someone (a coworker/past client) who has been recently and can feed off their feedback. Plus, we sit at computers for a reason, as we have access to a slew of specialized computer programs that can answer most inquiries with just a few clicks or keystrokes. Think of it this way: one day you want to go to Australia, so you hop online and book a return ticket for Sydney leaving next week. Seems perfect, right? But if you didn’t know you needed a Visa to enter Australia (based on Canadian citizenship), the second you got to the immigration counter at Syndey International you’d be denied entry and sent home on the next flight, not getting any of your money refunded.
Agents have your back. More than almost anything, that’s the biggest service we provide. We’re here to support you in booking and planning your dream vacation, but also to help you clean up the mess if something goes wrong. We have lots of industry contacts who we’ve built up relationships with over the years, and if there’s a glitch in your trip, we can go straight to the source and get it sorted out as smoothly as possible. It’s a symbiotic relationship, we support their product, they do their best to help us (and, consequently, you) out in a crisis. Plus, my company, at least, has more than 400 agencies across Canada, so they don’t want to make us mad. We control a nice amount of the selling power across the country, so we wield a little more pursuasive power as the travel companies don’t want to loose our business. I’ve had cases where suppliers will go above and beyond to get a matter sorted out to the client’s satisfaction solely because I was calling on behalf of my company. Online, you get none of this. The classic case is a woman who tried to book herself to London, England and accidentally booked her ticket to London, Ontario (the prices were probably pretty similar!). She was screwed, and there was no one to blame but her own ignorance. No online booking site is going to refund any money just because she didn’t read the fine print. If she had booked with an agent, on the other hand, she would have been going to England correctly in the first place 
Then there’s price. Travel agencies understand as well as anyone that in these tough economic times price is the bottom line, and that is why we have a vast network of suppliers – suppliers who do not sell to the public – that offer wholesale “bulk” prices and special contract prices just to us. These are usually better than or at least comparable to anything that could be found online, and without an agent you would have missed out.
Yes, we charge service fees. All agencies do it, and if they say they don’t, that’s because they’ve hidden it in the bill and called it a “tax”. We have to. No business could stay afloat if all they did was give out information all day and not get paid for it. And yes, this adds to the price of your vacation. Think about it, you’re paying for service, booking security and peace of mind. There is a difference between price and value, and what we offer is definitely valuable. When you get to Europe and realize you’d accidentally booked yourself into a hotel with one shared bathroom for all the rooms, or come home from the worst all-inclusive vacation ever and want to file a complaint about it, instead of just sitting and fuming, you could contact us and we could help you get it all sorted out while you sit and fume.
What it all boils down to is this: I love my job. I love creating people’s dreams on a daily basis and sharing all I know with my clients. It’s new and exciting every day, as I don’t know what adventures the day holds. Don’t get me wrong, dealing with distraught clients, stupid questions and annoying airlines isn’t always sunshine and roses, but at the end of the day there’s nothing better then hearing from an excited passenger that I had just sent them on the best vacation they’d ever had. So call your local travel agent and let them put their expertise to work on the best trip you’ve ever had 
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