Travel agents: A good way to book your trip

By John Frenaye

Travel columnist

updated 5:39 p.m. ET Feb. 5, 2007

John Frenaye Travel columnist • Profile • E-mail

Remember when you were a kid and you came upon that big, gray hornet’s nest? Ever poke it? Well, a recent column elicited a similar response. It was called “How not to book your vacation,” and it infuriated travel professionals from all over the country, who resented the implication that booking travel with a travel agent is a mistake. After reading the comments and addressing e-mails from my agent colleagues, I felt that telling the other side of the story was only fair.

I spoke with a 15-year veteran of the industry, John Felker, of Baton Rouge, La., who operates Go Away Travel/Travel Planners International to get his opinion on the need for a travel agent. I had my own notions, but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t off base. Immediately, John borrowed the recent American Society of Travel Agents tagline: Without a travel agent, you are on your own.

“After reading the column, you might think that going it alone is the way to go, but that is a dangerous road,” Felker said. The column told a story about the author’s friend Maryam, who booked a vacation through a travel agent that seemed to serve the agent's interest more than hers. In particular, the writer criticized the agent for booking airfares and room rates that got the agent a commission but restricted the client’s ability to upgrade. The story presented only one side of Maryam’s tale of woe. We will never know the other side, but the insinuation that the travel agent ruined someone’s holiday vacation is surely off the mark.

I asked John to tell me a few tales out of school about some of his clients and what he routinely does for them. He offered the following two illustrations, which really demonstrate the value a professional travel planner can bring to the transaction.

Happy 20th, hon!
A very good client came in to see me after having trouble making reservations for a 20th-anniversary trip for him and his wife. He wanted first-class air, a top-notch hotel, show tickets — the whole shebang. When he contacted the airline to use his frequent-flier points for air tickets, he found there were no seats available on the chosen dates. He asked if I could get the airline to release some seats for him. I let him know that frequent-flier seats are strictly capacity-controlled, and that the airlines generally allow only one or two per flight. I offered to search for upgradeable fares instead, and he agreed.

I turned to my CRS (Computer Reservation System, a system that offers far more information than is available on the Internet and which is directly linked to the airlines’ systems) and began the search. Bingo. Although the flight times weren’t exactly what my client wanted, I did find flights with fares that allowed him to use some of his frequent-flier points to upgrade to first class.

While I was checking for airfares, I checked out the various hotel loyalty programs in which he participated, and realized that my client had enough points with one hotel group to qualify for a better room category. So after finalizing the flights, I got on the phone with my hotel sales rep and secured my client a suite instead of a standard king-bedded room. My client thought I was a miracle worker, and to this day remains one of my most loyal clients.

Communication is obviously critical and it must go both ways. John apparently has the right attitude for a customer service career. He understood exactly what his client wanted, provided a reality check and then pulled out all the stops.

Agents to the rescue
John then told me about helping another client, just when she needed help most:

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Another time, a woman called my agency out of the blue, having found our phone number in the Yellow Pages. It seems that her husband suffered a heart attack on a business trip in London, and she needed to get to his bedside as soon as possible. She looked for a flight on the Internet and, finding fares that were several thousand dollars, called the airlines directly, but with no better luck.

As a last-ditch effort, she contacted us to see if there was anything we could do to help her get to London. We put all hands on deck, and soon every agent in our office was doing a computer search for fares and making calls to various consolidators with whom we had relationships. (Consolidators are companies that do not sell to the public and can offer steeply discounted fares). We had worked on this for about 20 minutes when Kevin, one of my co-workers, stood up and said, “I got it!” He had found a fare with a consolidator that would allow the woman to leave the next day, without a stipulated return date, and save her almost $600 over the published fares. The trip was successful, the husband recovered and this couple became loyal clients.

As John’s two examples show, a good travel agent does a lot more than simply make reservations. If agents’ work were that simple, would 80 percent of packaged vacations and cruises still be booked by traditional agents?

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