Somebody will tell you that if you book through a travel agency you will get a special discounted rate for some services. Sure, I wouldn’t tell this person that he or she is mistaken, but there is always some part of the truth missing here.
As every single thing in this life, the more intermediaries you place in a process, the more expensive the final product is. This rule is a golden rule and nothing, even a good-looking smiling and well-combed travel agent, is going to change it.
Travel agencies offer a service. A service that is not different from any other service that can be offered. And for this service, they need to get something in return. In this case, they always work together with some special partners and they will get commissions from them. This sounds quite fair. I recommend your services to all my clients and you give me some money in return.
The problem begins when we need to find out where this money comes from. Of course the tourism company involved, either if it is a hotel or an airline or any other service related, could choose to charge the same price, and instead of earning the full amount, a part of this amount will be destined to the travel agency.
Unfortunately, nearly every company in the tourism industry wants to keep winning the same money for delivering their services, so the result is that this extra amount of Passover hotels money used to pay the services for the agency is taken from your pockets, and makes your holidays more expensive. A cover they normally use for it is to tell you that they have some special negotiated prices with one determined service. This service normally will not involve a large amount of money, and the extra price paid for the other big services you need to use in your trip will dramatically overpass the money you can save with it.
Far from being something to complain about, I think the situation is pretty fair. You don’t have to fight hours and hours with the Internet looking for the best deals that sometimes will disappear the day after you found them. Those guys in travel agencies have the knowledge, the information and the resources to plan quick and efficiently your trip, so they can save you a lot of time. And, as we all know that time is money, probably their services are really helping in the final balance.
In any case, if you don’t want to use the services of a travel agency you have at least 3 possibilities. The first one, if you have a lot of experience, is to try to plan the trip yourself. With some time you will be tracking the best deals, locating the good airlines and hotels, and every time you need to travel you will have a better idea of where to take a look.
If this sounds like a big amount of work to do, you have two more possibilities: one is to hire the services of some consultant party. They can charge you around 50 dollars half an hour to get all your doubts solved. They are experts and the answers they will give to your questions will normally be of help, but the time is limited, and you never know if you will need to ask them more things in the future or something will change in the planning and you will need further assistance.