Question for the OzB community and for those who are or have been travel agents.
I'm curious to know the communities opinion on the pro's and con's of organising a trip using a travel agent or booking it by themselves. This can be split into domestic and international catagories also.
Ah. So your decision is purely based on price? No other deciding factors?
You know you're on OzBargain, right?
As I have always written my own activities/thing to do when I travel. I only use travel agents for price on hotel / flights. Can't comment on tour as I haven't been on any.
If it's a straight-forward return flight, where you're unlikely to be make changes, etc, then go with whoever's got the better price. However, for multi-leg and multi-airline flights, travel agents seem to be able to find the cheapest prices easier on their system easier than it is for us to do it online - but skyscanner.com is pretty good nowadays..
If you think there might be changes to your flights, etc, I would suggest buying direct with the airline. The reason being that some airlines will not deal with your change enquiries directly and refer you back to your travel agent. If there's a huge time difference and you can't get in touch with your travel agent, you might have problems.
Previously (this was years ago, so I'm not sure about now), the fees to change the flight were the travel agent's fee (on the ticket conditions) plus the airline fee. Some agents had fees and some didn't. The biggest that I've had was $350 in agency fees from a well-known travel agent. I was lucky that the airline decided to change it for me for free after I went to their desk instead of calling them.
Accomodation-wise, the websites like expedia are quite easy to navigate nowadays.
In my experience it's easier to get better prices when booking yourself. Mostly this is due to the internet ans comparison sites/apps. The travel agent is a small-ish premium paid to have someone else worry for you.
For me…NO travel agent. My family & I (i.e. 2 adults and 3 kids) have been to Bali, Japan (multi-cities, 2 weeks) and Vietnam (multi-cities, via Hong Kong, 3 weeks) I did all the planning and booking all accommodations, all flights (international + domestic), trains, local tours…no problem at all, all came home happy.
There are advantages to using a travel agent. If you find a good one, they can give you a lot of advice and share experiences that can't be found on a website. Just attend a travel expo and talk to a few agents and you'll see there are a lot of options you didn't realise you had.
On the other hand, you can do everything a travel agent can do. Sure you can plan multiple connecting flights and a range of hotels but I think it comes down to one thing… how much money is your time worth?
See I always thought that Travel agents can only get you certain things i.e. specific seats on a plane or a multileg trip with the same baggage allowance all on the one ticket, where as to book it yourself you cant…
whatever the Travel agents can get you, you can get it yourself. The only difference might be in price.
multileg trip with the same baggage allowance all on the one ticket, where as to book it yourself you can't…
You can do this yourself as well.
Interesting. Thought that was a TA perk
We mix and match - book all our activities and AirBnB stuff ourselves then get our Agent to book the airfares and any hotel and car hire - he has a talent for finding the best deals. We tracked our best deal down the first time we went to him and he beat it by 15 per cent. Now we just let him do it and spend our time finding more good places to eat.
We'll be in Waikiki next Thursday seeya suckers ;) :p
Going there for my honeymoon. Used a TA but thinking now I prob should have booked myself :(
use a travel agent if cheaper, otherwise buy yourself.
I recently organised a trip that involved, among other things, a double-entry Russian visa, double-entry Chinese visa, single entry Kazakstan visa and single entry Mongolian visa.
Used a travel agent for those bits. To get those visas, all hotels and ground travel had to be pre-arranged, and I don't speak or read Russian or Chinese.
On the same trip, I arranged all international and domestic travel through Europe, the rest of Asia, the US and Canada myself. I have worked in the tourism industry for 12 years, but never as a TA.
Situation dependant :)
why not both?