There is indeed much information available on the internet at this time regarding travel. There are online travel sites for cruises, hotels, air, trains and any kind of travel. But what’s the correct product for you personally? Is the location of the hotel where you want to be? Is the kind of room or cabin the right fit for you? Is that cruise line the main one you ought to be booking? Not absolutely all products are manufactured equal nor will be the products right for everyone. How does one tell? Contact a travel professional.
Do travel agents exist?
There have been multiple articles, and even the President of the United States, has said travel companies don’t exist or are going away. In a way they are right. Travel agents before were just somebody who booked a trip for somebody who called or came in to the storefront office of a travel agency. Storefront travel agencies are few in number now a days as most of the “travel companies” have gone home to work. Even the word “travel agent” is going away because what they do now is different than what they did before.
Travel Professionals/Travel Counselors
Travel Agents are actually more a counselor and an adviser so they are now called Travel Professionals or Travel Counselor. Even the travel industry is wanting to get from utilizing the term “travel agent”. They no more just book a trip for someone, they learn than what is available to the traveling client. The travel professionals now are constantly learning, constantly traveling, receiving input from other travel professionals about where they will have traveled and so are a resource for what is required to travel more recently.
Niagara day tour
By using an online travel agency like Expedia, Travelocity, etc. you are not in a position to have someone protect your back. They book the travel for you and then you are pretty much all on your own. Say your flight gets cancelled, who’s going to book a replacement flight? You’re, not them. If you use a travel professional that travel professional can do it. If something goes wrong on your own trip, if the room you booked is not like what you thought it might be, who is going to ensure it is right? A travel professional may also check constantly for price drops before final payment and whether a new promotion offered would be more beneficial than that which was booked with a deposit. Each one of these things can be addressed before final payment.
A travel professional works together with you from the time you first talk to them until you are home secure and every problems have already been solved or addressed.
It Costs More to Use a Travel Professional
This is not always true. True, some travel professionals charge fees but not every one of them do. Simply because some vendors, like airlines and some hotels, don’t pay commission or some of the vendors have decreased the number of commissions paid to the travel professional. To make ends meet, some travel professionals charge fees. I charge $50 per person for airline reservations domestically and $100 for airline reservations internationally. I will also charge a fee sometimes for hotels for the same reason or if I am putting the various parts of the trip together myself. EASILY book a cruise or a tour, I don’t charge a fee as the vendor pays me a commission. Remember, whether you use a travel professional or not the commission is still being paid since it is automatically included in the price from owner. So, why not work with a travel professional and avoid the hassle and save your time?
The rules for traveling are constantly changing in fact it is the travel professional who is able to keep their clients on the right track with them.
Examples: Passports
For instance, did you know that come January, 2016 you may need a passport to visit by air domestically? This is because of law called the REAL ID Act. This requires all travelers to get a REAL ID compliant identification that includes many of these fields: full legal name, signature, date of birth, gender, unique identifying number, a principal residence address and a front-facing photograph of the applicant. Unfortunately there are still a small number of states which are non-compliant. Do you know which states are compliant and which aren’t? Your travel professional does. By the way, outright non-compliant states/territories are American Samoa, Louisiana and New Hampshire. The states of Minnesota and NY offer an optional Enhanced ID at a price, so since it is optional, a large percentage of residents don’t have one. Some states have requested additional extensions, nonetheless it is unclear if those will be granted. Currently, only four states (Louisiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire and NY) and American Samoa are technically non-compliant.
Also, we still don’t know if January 1, 2016 will be the date of the requirement or might it be later? Because of this law, the passport processing time for several will be affected. All of the passports issued in 2006 to meet the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative that went into effect in 2007 are actually expiring, causing a slew of renewals. So, due to those renewals in conjunction with the possible REAL ID enforcement, passport waits are expected to further increase. As of October 11, the existing wait has recently increased weekly to four to six weeks for standard passports and three weeks for expedited. Expedited personally could be up to eight days predicated on travel need.
