Some travelers turn back to travel agents

On New Year's Day, James Vaughn gave his travel agent a tough assignment: Book a 10-day trip to India. Departure date: Jan. 13.

In 48 hours, David Rubin of DavidTravel in Corona Del Mar, Calif., had booked flights and hotel rooms, hired tour guides and even called the manager of a sold-out hotel to finagle a room.

Once, it seemed travel agents such as Rubin had gone the way of the milkman as online-booking sites such as Orbitz, Expedia and Travelocity soared in popularity.

Now they have been given a reprieve. That's because many vacations have become as hard to plan as the name of last year's traveler-stranding Icelandic volcano was to pronounce. Natural disasters cause flight cancellations. Revolutions put tourist destinations off-limits. Airlines and rental-car agencies confound with ever-increasing fees. And the Internet spews so much information that it hurts as much as it helps.

"Not only are customers confused and frustrated by new airline fees and events, but they are bombarded by social media," said John Clifford, president of the luxury-travel consultancy InternationalTravelManagement .com.

"Everyone is trying to tell you where you should stay, where you should eat, what you should do."

A study by Forrester Research found that the number of leisure travelers who enjoyed using the Web to book their vacations dropped from 53 percent in 2007 to 47 percent in 2010.

In an American Society of Travel Agents (ASTA) survey, 44 percent of agents said they had more clients in 2010 than they'd had the previous year.

Travelers "don't have hours to spend on research to compare multiple flights, multiple cruises, multiple packages," said Henry Harteveldt, a travel-industry analyst at Forrester Research. "It's not unlike doing your taxes. Depending on who you are, what your priorities are, there are some people who will choose to do it themselves or to use a professional."

Rise and fall

Credit commercial aviation with the rise of the travel agent in the 1920s. Blame online-booking sites for the travel agent's fall in the 1990s.

In 2001, there were 37,981 travel agencies, according to ARC, a company that provides financial services to travel agencies, airlines and travel suppliers. As of March, there were 16,564. Lauri Reishus, vice president of operations for ARC, said much of that decline is due to the consolidation of agencies.

The agents who survived have had to change their modus operandi. Airlines no longer pay them commissions, so most agents now charge fees in addition to receiving some commissions from cruise or tour operators. The average fee agents charge for buying a plane ticket, for instance, is $36. Of the 111,000 U.S. travel agents, 28 percent are now home-based. To compete with online-travel sites, they must be available round the clock; most now have specialties.

"Consumers are looking for specialists. They want a destination-wedding specialist, an Africa specialist, a Puerto Rico specialist," said Tony Gonchar, chief executive of ASTA.

What hasn't changed, agents say, is the relationships they can build with vendors. Many travel agents can get upgrades or perks, such as breakfast or a welcome cocktail, at hotels they use often. Many are also part of a buying consortium that negotiates special rates with hotels, tour operators and other vendors.

So do agents steer clients to certain vendors just because they pay commissions?

"I often thought the travel agent I used was trying to sell me what was in their brochure without ever considering my needs or knowing anything about the hotel they were recommending," said Allison Umbricht of Fairfield, Conn.

This spurred her to become an agent herself. The former accountant started Trips of a Lifetime eight years ago. She has long conversations with clients about their needs, then prices options with different vendors and breaks everything down for the client.

"We know that once we get a customer, we can keep them for life if we do a great job," she said.

Online still growing

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 for booking, often sites inaccessible to the average consumer. Orbitz, for instance, has developed Orbitz for Agents, which gives special access to more than 7,500 agents to its inventory.

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.