Travel agencies are having a moment amid Covid-19
wsj.com
wsj.com
Yes, one can do everything by themselves. But sometimes it's worth letting a middleman who actually adds value do some of the work.
I find this with lots of services. The help they provide is superficial and basically covers the easiest or most mechanical part of the task. But the actual intellectual part, they want to leave up to you. I'd much rather get my hand held on the decision making part, then filling out the form or whatever that may be annoying but is not particularly hard, even if it's the first time.
Ironically, in my business, I find it challenging to get people to trust you to give advice, they would rather come with a pre-determined, usually wrong, plan, and try to get me to implement it and take responsibility for the outcome. Which is maybe why services end up being more superficial, because people would rather tell someone else what to do than defer to expertise
No. I'm probably not going to pay a professional to plan my trip to NYC unless it has some very specific niche focus that they're expert in. But less traveled areas? Sure, if there's an appropriate pro available.
Is this something travel agents actually have any sort of exclusive access to? I thought travel agents were just resellers for existing travel packages. So if some tourism bureau has gone to the effort of assembling a package deal for a bunch of b&B's or inns to do a walking tour, the travel agent can book it for you. Or you can go to the tourism bureau's website and book it yourself. The travel agent isn't doing the work, they're just connecting you with a different middleman.
Just like a chef doesn't have exclusive access to ingredients, but they know what to buy and how to put it together.
Because it sounds great, and a little too good to be true. In my (admittedly limited) experience with travel agents, that's not really what they do, nor is it something i'd trust them to do - the travel agents don't seem to have any specialized local knowledge, what they do have is a catalogue that their agency has provided them with and they can help you choose a package from the predefined ones in their catalogue. This sort of concierge travel agent is not something i'm familiar with.
The advantage of OTAs is you often can find cheaper hotels/flights than travel agents provide. However, some travel agents will then match or beat these prices.
The upside of a travel agent is when things go pearshaped. A lot of OTAs are based overseas and are (apparently) reluctant to deal with refunds/rebookings as readily, and you have to deal directly with them. Try speaking to the airline and they say 'oh you booked with an OTA, talk to them', and the OTA will say 'we're waiting to hear from the airline'. A travel agent will often do all this hunting/arguing for you, and can access Sabre/other GDSs to modify bookings themselves.
I've backpacked solo through most of the 'stans and South America. It's doable. But with a family, say? Or with a group of friends with fixed timelines (eg x weeks of annual leave) I'd be using a travel agent myself for some more adventurous travels.
I’ve always been curious, how much % of your traffic is from the ozbargain posts compared to people coming to the site directly?
Also is there much to be made on affiliate commission on flights or is it just optimistically hoping for hotel/car reservations?
There's ok commission money on flights (that's why it's a side hustle) - although if people booked hotels with every flight I'd do a LOT better ;)
(Works with any DNS; Looks like "Reader Mode" in Firefox)
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firefox ./1.htm
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links ./1.htm <--- recommended :) echo 212.80.216.76 archive.md >> /etc/hostsI see you work there and I don’t mean any disrespect but I have issues letting an Ad company see all of my traffic.
Too damn bad. Travel was the number one reason this virus was able to proliferate so quickly. That needs to get fixed; the next virus might not be so gentle.
Travel was already horrible after 9/11 and the idiotic anti terrorism rules.
The myriad of different covid regulations make traveling ridiculously hard, even for people who are vaccinated, at least in Europe.
I was planning a multi countries trip and I gave up after a week of trying to find reliable testing facilities for a good price, matching with flights, matching with Airbnbs. My stomach ulcer started to act up because of the extra stress so I decided to avoid the pain.
We'll just book a one way flight, do one stupid test, cross one border, stay in one country and book everything last minute after we know we passed whatever idiotic rules are valid at the moment.
The idea that its just a massive waste of money among the tech space is hilarious when people will also make the most minute changes to their workflow to save fractions of a second, but not pay someone $50 to remove hours of headache from a fun event like a holiday.
We are making society increasingly more difficult to navigate and creating more barriers that imped the movement of people. We are all hurt by these policies and I have not seen sufficient evidence that they do anything to curb the spread of covid now with high transmission rates all over the world. The time for travel restrictions for most of the world has long passed.
I agree there are middlemen who add value.
I also think that when middlemen become essentials, it's a sign we are over-regulating society.
I have a lot of respect for Amazon in the early days: they really changed the world of online shopping.
In the last years, they didn't innovate their e-commerce offering and I attribute a lot of their growth to pure government regulation.
The great european VATMOSS (together with GDPR, SCA, cookie banners) killed small independent e-commerces with and pushed the survivors on Amazon, just to avoid the complexity. Let all remember how VATMOSS was supposed to "tax big tech". COVID lockdowns are now killing physical small businesses and Amazon is benefiting from it.
The question is more one of a value judgement. Is that value "fair" at its price? At the vary least many middle-provide market making functions. Even with your more recent Amazon example, there was nothing stopping smaller e-commerce stores from complying with VATMOSS. If Amazon wasn't there, most of them probably would have been able to hire consultants or other firms to help them comply. They didn't because Amazon was cheaper/easier. Is the loss of control to Amazon worth it? For the vendor? For society? Unclear, but we are only in the position because of the value Amazon provided even it comes with a social cost.
The question I'm hinting at is: is Amazon using the money they earned in their first phase by being a useful middleman to push the narrative in a certain direction (eg. lobbying, owning a newspaper, etc) and influence governmental bodies so that they introduce more regulation which Amazon benefit from?
If the capital we're giving to Amazon gets reinvested to make everyone's life more complicated so that we need more Amazon and Amazon can grow more, then it's not something I want to spend my money on.
You may be right, but that's the particular phrase I took issue with.
And contrary to what you're saying, I've gotten some awesome travel deals during the pandemic. I had many months of AirBnBs for 20-30% less than the normal rate.