This article is for your reference only.
My rule to buy normal airline ticket is, if I can get similar price from the website directly, I will not go for online agency.
At the beginning of this article, watch out following situation:
The flight price search website ownership - you might use skyscanner quite a lot, but do you know the ownership of the website has been purchased by a online travel agency to attract more customers. You could think whether such closer relationship can still provide you objective information to choose your agency.
After you purchased the ticket from an agency, does it provide you airline issued eticket pdf or just a confirmation generated by their system. It doesn’t mean you need to worry about they didn’t purchase the ticket for you, you need to rethink whether they have a good system linked to the airline to acquire the timely information.
Can you find your booking on the airline website by the reference provided by them. Watch out for those agencies told you the ticket is fine, but they don’t have the correct reference. Even it is true, I will not use them the next time because travel is all about peace of mind to me.
Someone might think the closer relationship to airlines or bargain power of online travel agencies can provide you more service. To me, it is doubtful.
online agencies are just like retailers of products, above them, could be ticket wholesalers or airlines. If the ticket is purchased through a wholesaler from them, there could be more fee to change to cancel the ticket due to the middle man will charge you.
even it’s a ticket purchase through airline from an agency, you need to watch out for whether or not they provide you services in time. For example, does it take a long time to change your ticket or to add service, if it is so, it might indicate they don’t have a direct system to change or add more service for you, the customer services on the other end also might need to call the airline on your behalf. It could be a loss to you if you are in a emergency and if you don’t want some misunderstood happened when passing the information through a middle man. Same apply to the tickets purchase from wholesaler.
Some other trouble may happen
when you want to change a ticket with airline directly, but they let you call your agency because it an agency purchase
in emergency, the agency don’t want to cover your loss by telling you they are merely an agency, you need to contact the airline
So there’s no point to me to buy a ticket from an agency if airline offers the same price
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Hotel
Sometimes, customers cannot avoid to book hotel from agencies because hotel price could be cheaper through agencies but:
Make sure you call the hotel to reconfirm the booking after the agency confirmation sent to you
Watch out any remark says it’s a booking through hotel partners(it means it’s not a direct booking with hotel, but through another agency or wholesaler). When you want to change or cancel for this kind of booking, no matter how bad the situation is, normally if the hotel cannot do anything because it is through a agency’s agency, it will be troublesome.
Watch out the agency told you even the booking is confirmed, the hotel cannot find the booking until some like point of time. If you have received the confirmation for a few days and it’s happened, normally it indicates the hotel really doesn’t have the booking, and it’s a booking through agency’s partners who don’t want to send your booking to the hotel now because they are still waiting for some last minute cheaper price(my assumption ) to get more profit.
Thanks for reading.
Not sure what the point of this is, but thanks for sharing your experience I suppose.