NB: This is a guest article by Rod Cuthbert, founder and chairman emeritus at Viator and founder and CEO at Qewz.
Readers of the New York Times Frugal Traveler column were treated to a walk down memory lane recently in a piece headlined: Is the Best Travel Search Engine Around the Corner?
And what a revealing column it was, shining a spotlight on the lingering shortcomings of travel search engines when compared to a good ol’ main street travel agent with a green screen and a whole lot of specific destination experience.
Back in the 1990s we saw a lot of articles like this, comparing that fast-becoming-extinct breed with their online replacements, though the tone was generally:
"Isn’t this sad? All the travel agents are dying..."
And then the media lost interest, other than to report the steady decline in agency numbers, and the steady rise in online bookings.
So it was a delight to see Seth Kugel, the Frugal Traveler, perform some real world experiments that convincingly highlight why certain types of travel (his best example is a New York to Croatia round trip where the agent beat the online giants by 40%) are often best booked through traditional agents who specialise in a destination.
We’ve all seen these agencies, the ones sporting decade-old posters for possibly defunct airlines, too many desks in too little space, ARC reports and GDS training manuals strewn randomly about the place, and naturally two or three Sabre or Galileo screens, dust-covered envoys from our distant past.
Of course we inside the so-called new industry always knew these guys could generally win a head-to-head battle on a specific travel plan.
The specialist model works, but can’t scale up to compete, and besides that the up-close and personal experience of dealing with an agent is as often a negative as it is a positive.
But still, this article will give some agents a little spike in business, perhaps, even if it's just a tiny one, localised to New York Times readers.
Like the Black Knight battling King Arthur in Monty Python And The Holy Grail ("...'tis but a scratch" he says, as his arm falls off) some agents won't lie down. Good on 'em.
NB: This is a guest article by Rod Cuthbert, founder and chairman emeritus at Viator and founder and CEO at Qewz.