“I went to her after I screwed up, tail between my legs,” said the chief executive of a publishing company. “That’s what a good travel agent would do. If you make a mistake, they clean up your mess.”
Sometimes, however, it’s the agent who makes the mess.
A couple of years ago, Marian Thier, a leadership consultant in Boulder, Colo., had to go to Charleston, W.Va., on business. A travel agent arranged the trip for her and nine team members. Thier got her boarding pass and proceeded to the gate, where she noticed that the destination sign was for Charleston, S.C. Thinking it impossible that the travel agent had screwed up, she told an airline employee that the gate had the incorrect city posted. The gate agent chuckled. Thier glanced at her boarding pass again; sure enough, she was booked to Charleston, S.C.
The travel agency re-booked the group, covered all the change fees and bought everybody a round of drinks.
The lines blur
The travel agent’s comeback doesn’t mean that online travel booking is losing its luster. PhoCusWright, a travel-industry research firm, predicts that global online travel booking will grow 11 percent in 2011 to $284 billion and 10 percent in 2012 to $313 billion. By 2012, one-third of the world’s travel sales will be booked online.
The online travel community would argue that it has formed a symbiotic relationship with brick and mortar travel agents. Most travel agents use online tools to book their travel. Often, these are sites that the average consumer doesn’t have access to. Orbitz, for instance, has developed Orbitz for Agents, which gives more than 7,500 offline agents special access to its inventory.
“It’s no longer a case of us versus them,” said Brian Hoyt, vice president of corporate communications and government affairs at Orbitz. “The line is blurred.”
Andrew Weinstein, a spokesman for the Interactive Travel Services Association, an industry trade group that represents Expedia and other sites, said that all the online booking companies now have employees available to talk to customers by phone or instant message. Travelocity, for instance, has customer support available 24/7.
“There are no online companies that aren’t providing real world customer support,” Weinstein said. “What you’re really finding is the digitization of travel, offline or online.”
There are some travelers who will always want to do things on their own. Ellen Robin and her husband, Nelson, Germantown residents who own a software consulting company, are diehard do-it-yourself vacation planners. They’ve planned trips to Europe, Israel, Canada, Mexico and other international destinations on their own. They like being able to look at all the options, read the reviews, study the menus and decide for themselves where to go and what to do. They even manage to find apartment rentals overseas. Their tools: guidebooks (yes, they’re still around), online reviews and recommendations from friends.
“I don’t see how a travel agent would add any value,” Robin said. “Who knows best what and when we’d like to do things? We do.”
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