‘Google Flights’: Better Than Agents? It’s Deja Vu All Over Again

Here we go again: Yet another article in the consumer media praises the wonders of online travel technology at the expense of “traditional” travel agencies.

A Huffington Post story titled “6 Google Flights Tricks That Are Better Than Any Travel Agent,” touts Google Flights’ ability to find low fares, suggest destinations and tell you which flights give you “the best bang for your buck” in terms of connections and total flight times.

It includes “I’m Feeling Lucky,” a tool that will plan your trip based on your search history and “what is popular.”

‘Better than any travel agent’???
Google Flights can be a handy tool for travelers who fly simple itineraries and whose greatest concern is a low fare. It can be fun to play with. But “better than any travel agent” is a claim that can only be described, kindly, as a stretch.

Weirdly, its results for a St. Louis to Amsterdam search include a connection in New York, with a change of airport from LaGuardia to Kennedy. There is no dearth of one-stop services on the route; a change of airport is unnecessary.

Google Flights also seems to interpret “multi-city” as “Let’s cram as many stops into this trip as possible.”

For a St. Louis to Amsterdam search, intended to be the start of an Amsterdam-Paris-Nice trip, it returned a St. Louis-Seattle-Reykjavik-Amsterdam routing.

The layover in Seattle was 19 hours and 40 minutes. This does not bode well for a traveler looking to price a multi-city trip to Europe.

Let’s just go with Valparaiso, Fla.
After performing several international flight searches, clicking the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button produced the bizarre suggestion that the traveler select Valparaiso, Fla., as a destination. That seemed a tad random for a recommendation that is supposedly based on search history and popularity.

Google Flights performs better on simple, nonstop point-to-point domestic itineraries.

It makes helpful suggestions, such as upgrading to first class for about $50 on one flight. The extra legroom on a regional jet might be worth it for tall travelers. It suggests alternate airports when lower fares or nonstops are available.

But so will a travel agent.

The mysterious ‘travel agent’
Travel is a popular – and hot-button – topic, so the article drew more than 160 comments, which turned into a heated debate that revealed a disappointing fact: Many people simply don’t know what travel agents do.  

“Please, for most trips a travel agent is useless,” one reader wrote.

To which Paul Iacono of Journeys Beyond the Ordinary responded, “You’re probably correct, since ‘most trips’ are to the nearest beach or city, and most travelers are looking for the cheapest getaway they can find.”

Journeys Beyond the Ordinary, an affiliate of Travel Experts in Raleigh, N.C., doesn’t even attempt to serve that type of customer, Iacono said.

But if a customer wants to skip waiting in line for four hours to get into the Sistine Chapel, or spend a day fossil hunting in Africa with a member of the Leakey family, or get seated in a restaurant that has been booked up for months, Iacono said he has the connections to make it happen.

A ‘deal’ and ‘value’—not the same thing
Cessy Meacham of Anytime Travel Solutions in Melbourne, Fla., noted that finding flights is “such a minimal part” of an agent’s job. “Travel professionals are here to help people who understand the difference between a ‘deal’ and ‘value,’” she said.

Pam Smithgall of South Shore Travel Services in League City, Tex., agreed.

“There are lots of us in the travel business who do custom travel planning, and what we do is way beyond some perceived deal on a flight,” Smithgall wrote.

Like Google Flights, agents watch out for lower fares and other deals to help clients out, but “something that is cheaper is very often not a better use of a traveler’s time and hard-earned money.”

And noting that quite a few responses to the article called agents “dinosaurs” or “extinct,” Smithgall answered that “for a profession that supposedly doesn’t exist, we sure are busy these days!”

As for the “I’m Feeling Lucky” feature of Google Flights, Laila Matarwe of Five Star Travel in Oceanside, Calif., suggested that serious travelers leave the “luck” to the tables in Las Vegas.

When customers require the services of a doctor, accountant or contractor, they don’t rely on luck, she said. They turn to a professional.

“Why should your travel dollars and vacation time be any different?” Matarwe asked.