In 2020, I did all the planning for a trip to Spain and France that was of course canceled. We are going to take it this July, yay. The Spanish resort I booked for six nights is going to honor the 360 euro deposit I put down. We will then go to Normandy for five nights and Paris for a few days. I’m wondering if I should use a travel agent this time. It was so much work before, and not everything went smoothly (don’t ever use JustFly.com, ha). We do not want any guided tours other than at Normandy - I signed up with Overlord tours and they were nice enough to refund the entire cost so I’m inclined to go with them again if possible.
A friend of mine and I were scheduled to go to Portugal for a weeklong tour + 2 additional days on our own with a private guide at either end when covid hit. She also had a stroke about a month before we scheduled to leave. The travel insurance company was refusing to refund our lost deposit for the tour because we might be able to take another tour with the same company at a future date. Ha! I was also unable to show the insurance company that 100% of airline ticket cost had been refunded because my credit card had been hacked in the interim and I’d been issued a new number but the ticket refund had been applied to the closed card. And I had to show I’d been refunded by the airline before they would process the rest of my claim.
Because my friend was hospitalized for weeks at a rehab center and unable to receive visitors due to covid and was having much difficulty with her language so phone conversations were out, getting her documents together to submit her travel claim with the insurance company was a nightmare.
The travel agent handled it all and got our deposit back for the tour from the travel insurance company , despite my friend being unwilling to tell the travel insurer that she’d had a medical issue and refusing to provide any medical documentation to them showing she was physically unable to travel on our tour dates.
So, yeah, I will alway use a travel agent for major overseas trips.
I used a local office of All World Travel and was very pleased with the service I received.
I haven’t used a travel agent since 1986, but I enjoy researching locations and travel methods FWIW.
Rome2Rio can help with getting from point A to point B.
We used this on our last 2 Euro trips (Austria, Germany, France and England, Amsterdam, France, Austria, Germany) and it was a godsend for determining flights and train travel.
Michelin for car travel, including restaurants and hotels en route.
Use trip advisor and third party sites to find lodging, then book with the hotel directly (often cheaper because breakfast or parking is included).
The Rick Steves travel forums had good ideas and recs for tours etc. Unfortunately, they’ve suspended their travel consulting service.
We’re using a travel agent for the first time ever for a European cruise + additional time in Italy. I’d have to say it’s been a great experience with everything from hotels to transportation and tours all very well coordinated along with great recommendations. .
But that said, if you love researching and planning then I can totally see wanting to do everything yourself. In our case we just didn’t feel like it this time around.
We usually plan our own travel but recently used a local agent for an upcoming 2 week overseas vacation. Many friends have used this agent and we had a lot going on at the time so decided to let someone else plan it. If we were going to just 1 location I may have done it myself but moving around, lots of excursions, transportation,etc. I’m glad we had someone else do the planning.
I have used a travel agent once, which left me with a bad taste. I always have planned our own trips, but we were going on our first trip to Europe in the early 2000s, yep, we aren’t big travelers! This was a local travel agent that my SIL always used and knew personally. As we were going to several cities in Italy, I was afraid to try to plan this trip; after the fact, I realized I would have done a good job.
The trip ended up costing us several thousands of dollars more than if I had planned myself. The agent insisted in Italy we could only stay in a hotel that offered breakfast; we like to grab coffee and danish on the go. We were willing to share a room with the kids, but was told by the agent there were no room that allowed that; there were. She insisted all excursions and exhibits had to be purchased in advance; that also was not true, we could have purchased on the spot for the day and time we wanted for almost all. One excursion we didn’t want to go on due to weather, but went as the tickets were purchased; our hotel was offering a free tour the next day when the weather was going to be nice.
I know this was just my experience, so take it with a grain of salt. I was just mad at myself for not trusting my own skills, and not making the agent understand our budget for the trip. She had me convinced her hotels and suggests were the way to go, even when I continued to tell her we were not a Ritz Carlton family, that we just required a clean, nice hotel. I didn’t like having to still to a specific time and date for a tour if we wanted to spend extra time at one location. Lesson learned for us!
If it was just a roundtrip ticket and hotels, you could do it yourself. However, these days, airfares are all over the place and are not included on all travel search engines so I find myself searching multiple online platforms and the airlines themselves. It can take a lot of time and, meanwhile the great fare that you found but didn’t book because you wanted to check other sites might be gone. For time savings alone, it’s probably worth speaking to a travel agent you trust and getting their quote. If things go wrong, they can be a real help.
When we lived overseas, we had a WONDERFUL travel agent that we used to book basically everything. I found that his fares were equal to or better than anything I could find most of the time. And the few times things went wrong (not his fault), he was with us all the way until the problem was solved.
Worst case, it’s just another quote that you can compare with fares, hotel rates etc that you find yourself.
ok, so this is funny. I agree that it takes a lot of work.
But my experience is that a travel agent will give you the “easy” answer and not spend a significant amount of time looking. For example, we have an upcoming trip. We can fly out of PHL, BWI, EWR, JFK, IAD. Many different airline options. Must connect, but only want to connect once. I had a gazillion tabs open and eventually landed upon what I thought was best - time, value, connection, etc. A travel agent would have given me the first answer (imho).
So… since I know our travel style and preferred options… I will spend the time that I don’t trust someone else to.
I’m also planning a trip this year and will consult w/our AAA travel agent company (free as AAA members). I will say they planned a Jamaica trip for us about 12 years ago - I think I could have gotten a better deal financially, but was a much more tentative traveler then (and there were fewer internet resources).
I plan to go and get information, then do some research on my own & cross-check (as a starting point and also to be sure I didn’t miss something).
We consulted w/ a travel agent to book my D’s travel to her study abroad - there were lots of details I wasn’t aware of (e.g., the ‘good deal’ I found was good b/c it was non-refundable - didn’t notice that at first!). Others might be more savvy though!
11 years ago, we used an agent to plan our three week trip to two places in Africa and one in Europe…same trip. There were a lot of moving parts including flying a kid to meet us. And booking hotels and resorts in two places. It was just nice to have someone else handle those moving parts. And the trip was perfect!
I decided to meet with a local travel agent that several people recommended. We can talk to her for 30 minutes for no charge and see what we think. I am just too fried to plan the trip myself. I literally spent all day helping my adult son with different issues and a doctor’s appointment, and I think it will be an ongoing effort to keep him relatively “independent.”
Side comment, but we did a tour with them a few years ago and they were great! I hope you’re doing a full-day tour where you stay in Bayeux the nite before and start first thing in the morning instead of a tour that meets a train from Paris. There is so much to see that even a full day felt like it just scratched the surface. And if you stay in Bayeux or vicinity you can also see the Tapestries the previous afternoon, which are just amazing.
There is just so much to see in Normandy I want to go back! I hope you get a chance to go see Mont St. Michel, and I’d also recommend Honfleur (and Etretat if you like Impressionist art) as well as Cancale (great oysters). And if you’re going to Honfleur/Etretat then Trouville is on the way, a place one of my favorite Monet paintings depicts. You can still recognize some of the buildings he painted along the beach boardwalk The Boardwalk at Trouville, 1870 - Claude Monet - WikiArt.org
But as for a travel agent, I don’t know. A great travel agent listens to what you are interested in and has the knowledge/experience to plan a tour that matches. A poor agent puts everyone into the limited sites they know about and/or the ones that are easiest for them to arrange. And the office won’t have a label on the door of which type of agent they are.
I highly recommend using a travel agent for most cases. Two of our 3 Oct trips we did use and for Costa Rica it just made everything easier. Our last trip to Belize, because of the specifics that my husband wanted we did ourselves. The travel agent we use just asks for a 100$ for their time, and I pay it as its worth it to get an idea about things.
Before Covid I never used one. Now I wont not use one.
Sounds like you have a lot going on and a travel agent might take some of the burden off your shoulders. That can be a very good thing.
I’m not a travel agent type person, but I don’t do big overseas trips that much. When we have I just book it myself. We have a Chase Sapphire Visa card that offers a lot of travel benefits if you book through their site. They probably have an agent you can talk to come to think of it, but I just usually book through Chase’s Ultimate Rewards site. I can book airfare and some hotels, could get a rental car that way too. The Sapphire card comes with really good travel insurance also so that is a nice perk.
Quick side question @ Sweetgum : We also have the Sapphire card, but have never booked through the Sapphire site. I thought by using the card, you get whatever insurance comes with it, even if you book direct with the hotel, car rental, or whatever. Are there additional perks we’re missing by booking through their site?
So true! I have used a travel agent. I agree, they have always been helpful if something goes wrong. Luckily, we haven’t had much or anything really go wrong, but when we have our agent has really gone above and beyond. Our travel agency also has an after-hours emergency helpline that you can call if you’re traveling and something goes wrong after their business hours.
You really have to find a good agent. Our travel agent has never given me the “easy” answer or the “first” answer they find, but then again, I’d say they’re a very qualified and professional agent, who is good at what they do and they get paid a salary, so they aren’t working on commission so they don’t feel too pushed to make a quick sale…
I have a colleague whose daughter is a travel agent. She said they had a customer who wanted to go to Syria (just to see the historical sites), they had to turn them down. Too much liability as it’s a destination that most governments warn you against visting.
Last time I used a travel agent was 1999, when one booked us on a small African airline that had gone out of business several months before the tickets were even booked. We didn’t find out until after we arrived at the tiny airport in Kariba, Zimbabwe. After spending almost a year trying to get our money back, there were so many hoops we had to jump through that we gave up and ate the loss of about $600.
I also felt that this particular agent was trying to book us into places and activities that gave him the best commission, rather than what worked best for us.
I find much of the fun regarding going on vacation is doing research beforehand to see what places to go to.
