The internet has made our world more connected than ever. From paying our bills to buying new clothes, everything can be done with just a click of a mouse. Travel has been no exception, as now more and more people opt for booking their flight and hotels themselves online versus through an agency.
A recent article in Forbes Magazine shed some light on why a website will never replace years of expertise by industry professionals. We couldn't agree more.
From Micah Solomon, Contributor to Forbes
I fly an awful lot.
(And let me tell you, folks, my arms get very tired.) Arm fatigue notwithstanding, here’s my deal. I work as a keynote speaker and consultant on customer service/customer experience/hospitality/marketing. This means I’m professionally valued only when I get my buns out of the office chair and onto an airplane, to deliver my message on in person.
To increase the logistical challenge, the events I speak to are geographically scattered — it seems like each banking industry, healthcare, automotive, retail, financial services, insurance, B2B, food service, and so forth audience is a daunting and precisely equal distance from the next, all over the U.S., Europe, Asia, the Mideast, Africa. (Nothing in Antarctica yet, and, to my Hobbit-loving kids’ chagrin, nothing in New Zealand or Australia yet either).
I’m not, even for a moment, complaining (except about the lack of New Zealand events. And that complaint was inserted by my daughter.) There are people who travel even more than me, for less enjoyable reasons. It would be hard for me to love my job more than I do. I do, however, hate making travel arrangements. I know there are people who enjoy putting together the jigsaw puzzle of a travel itinerary. (In fact, a recent study of the Millennial generation of customers found that people of all ages spend an astounding average of 42 hours online checking out and presumably daydreaming over future travel before booking a trip. If you’re one of these folks and this works for you, good on ya.) But my actual job is putting together the jigsaw puzzle of a speech, a book, a seminar. Which I enjoy more than I enjoy fiddling around online with travel.
Nonetheless, for too long I fell into the trap of thinking that self-service was the only reasonable option now that the traditional, commission-based travel agency model has fallen apart, and now that self-booking online had become so much easier than it used to be. But just because you can do something yourself doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
Lisa Timmons (my travel agent at United Nations Travel) has something I think of as tradeskill. A nuanced and honed-over-the-decades vision of when it’s safe to wait to book a ticket, when waiting isn’t a risk worth taking, which airline connections are tighter than they would appear, and so forth. I am assuredly getting my fee’s worth per flight, a fee I happily pay now that we’re in the post-commission era in travel.
In our transparent world of travel these days, you can be a partner with your travel agent in a way you couldn’t be in the past. You can give apps such as Kayak a once-over and ensure your agent didn’t miss anything. You can challenge judgment calls she makes, and get her to prove her point better than the old “trust me, everything’s opaque” days. But your travel agent will always know stuff you’ll (or at least I’ll) never know. At least that I’ll never know without wasting too much time on learning it.
There are things I know better about my travel preferences than Lisa does, of course. There are times I want to fly a particular airline so I can specifically review its customer service. Or maybe I just know I’ll be out late with friends next Thursday night and will never in a million years get over the Friday morning deathlike feeling quickly enough to get on a morning flight. And of course only I can know how worn out I’m feeling and therefore how unwilling or willing I am this week to even consider squeezing into a center seat.
Working with a travel agent isn’t nirvana, it’s a partnership. Which, I think, is better than just poking around on an app.
So what do you think? Tweet us @odysseytraveler or post on our Facebook page and tell us why or why not you book with an agency!
