Travel Agents Tell How They Save Clients Money & Aggravation

Travel agents save clients money and aggravation, a recent ASTA study confirms. But numbers don’t tell the whole story.  

The ASTA study shows that travel agent usage is at its highest in the three years since the organization began commissioning its own consumer research. About 22% of consumers say they book trips through an agent.  

The report, from market research firm TNS, surveyed 14,000 households about their travel habits. The consensus, said ASTA president Zane Kerby, is that “agents save consumers an average of $452 per booking.”  

It’s harder to put a dollar value on the sorts of “above and beyond” services that many agents say is how they win and retain clients.  

Earning ‘clients for life’
Rick Ardis, president of Ardis Travel in Rutherford, NJ, and a newly elected ASTA board member, recalled when he made “clients for life” by helping them out of a bind during a vacation interrupted by Hurricane Irene in August 2011.  

He had booked a trip to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic for two women in their early 20s. As Irene passed over the island—twice—he got frantic calls from the mother of one young woman and the father of the other.  

Ardis got his clients’ room at the hotel upgraded; arranged for them to spend an extra night while they waited for the airport to reopen; and then, when it became apparent that every airport in the northeast U.S. was closed, rerouted their return flight to Pittsburgh, the nearest airport to their New Jersey home that was still operating. They made it back to their final destination by car.  

“Because they had listened to my advice and bought insurance, they were reimbursed for everything: the extra hotel night, the rebooked airline tickets, the hotel in Pittsburgh, and even the cost of the gas to drive home.”   

While clients don’t necessarily need an agent to tell them to buy insurance, “booking online isn’t going to stress how important that is,” Ardis noted. And of course, there’s the value of the time he spent rebooking the arrangements and getting them home—at a time when tens of thousands of travelers were stranded. “They were very grateful, and they are still my clients,” he said.   

All about relationships
“It’s all about the relationships between me and my clients, and me and my suppliers,” said Diana Hechler, of D Tours and Travel, Larchmont, NY. “That means that I will extend myself for their benefit.” 

She too has dealt with issues arising when a college-age client goes off on an adventure, often for the first time. Recently, she said, she helped an anxious mother and father whose daughter was traveling in Chile. When the young woman decided she wanted to travel to the high desert on her own, Hechler spent hours on the phone with the family while making the arrangements. Her expertise came in handy: she’d traveled in that region previously.  

“I knew I could find a hotel that would include the 90-minute transfer from the airport and would offer all the appropriate excursions,” she said. “The parents could stop worrying about their daughter hiking alone in the mountains.”     

It’s not just helping people in distress, Hechler said; it’s also about helping clients get the most out of their trip. And for that, agents can draw on their relationships with hotels, cruise lines and other suppliers, as well as their own destination expertise.    

In Thailand, for example, an elephant ride is considered de rigueur, she said. However, the first-time visitor may not know that many commercial  operations, particularly in busy tourist areas,  treat their elephants poorly—and “who wants to be a part of that?” Instead, Hechler points her clients to a responsible elephant sanctuary. “There’s no way the online consumer can know about these things.” 

In times of crisis
And then there are those extraordinary times when agents get in crisis mode. Terry Regan, president of Berkeley’s Northside Travel, in Berkeley, CA, recalled the morning of 9/11. By the time he arrived at his office, “we’d already done a printout of every client that was traveling that day, and who was going to be on the road every day that week. Every agent went to work and helped out; each one had the PNRs on their desk of customers who were traveling.”   

And loyalty goes both ways, too. Regan said that recently he got a call on a Saturday from a long-time client who had fallen ill while on a package tour in Montreal and needed to go home.  There was only one snag: she hadn’t booked her trip through the agency, but through the local senior center. No problem, said Regan; he got her a flight and called the tour operator to straighten out insurance coverage and tie up other loose ends.  

“She’s been a client for 20 years,” he said. “Was there any question what I was going to do?”