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Internet's No Match for a Good Agent
The Travel Tightwad · October 25, 2001

Click or call?

When it comes to making travel plans, I've never hesitated to lift the mouse before picking up the receiver. I used to think travel agents were as obsolete as biplanes. Then I tried to find a reasonable airfare from Miami to Vienna to visit my family this Thanksgiving, and I discovered I'd been dead wrong.

In an ideal world, I'd pay a few hundred dollars for a nonstop flight on Austrian Airlines, which is hands-down my favorite carrier to central Europe. But the world after September 11 is anything but ideal.

Austrian Airlines suspended its nonstop service between Miami and Vienna after the terrorist attacks, citing a "drop in consumer demand." This meant I'd probably be at the mercy of a U.S. airline for at least part of the trip. And then fares went crazy. A lot of airlines dropped prices to international destinations, but some, like Lufthansa, bucked the trend by raising rates.

Here's the bottom line: last year I paid just over $400 for a round-trip ticket. This year it looked like I might have to shell out as much as $1,100.

I reluctantly agreed to accept any fare from any airline as long as I didn't have to make more than one stop. This meant I might get stuck on a carrier that I'd prefer not to fly on, like Delta Air Lines and United Airlines. I would, of course, do everything I could to steer my business to one of the European carriers that understand the concept of customer service. But if push came to shove, I would shove my 6'1" frame into a seat with 30 inches of legroom and endure the transatlantic voyage.

First I clicked on Orbitz to check on special Internet fares that I hoped to use as a starting point. But when I compared the Orbitz search results to the ones I found through SideStep, I concluded that Orbitz probably wouldn't offer the most attractive rate for my itinerary. The airline websites - some of which had invested in Orbitz - seemed to be undercutting their own ticket re-seller. This made absolutely no sense to me.

The best price I found was almost $200 higher than what I'd paid in 2000. Not good.

Undeterred, I surfed over to a few online consolidators (agents that offer cheaper tickets by buying them from the airline in bulk and then reselling them at a markup). A fair number of the consolidator sites such as Discount Airtickets, were almost unusable and produced prices that were significantly higher than the ones I was getting from the airline websites. Ditto for OneTravel.com, which couldn't come close to what the airline sites were offering, even using its "Farebeater ULTRA" search function.

Finally I called three human travel agents. One, a Carlson-Wagonlit affiliate in Annapolis, Md., is owned by a friend. The other two were random calls to agents referred by the Austrian National Tourist Office's website. Both cold-calls promised to phone back "soon" if they could come up with an affordable fare. As I write this column, I haven't heard from either of them. But the agent in Annapolis did call me with a very attractive consolidator fare-about $75 more than I'd paid the year before. It was a fast connection on United to Washington and Austrian to Vienna.

Needless to say, the travel agent got my business.

I'm not suggesting that every agent is going to outdo the Internet, or vice versa. Nor am I saying that sites like Orbitz and OneTravel never offer respectable airfares. Sometimes their deals are outstanding. I'm just saying that next time I have to travel anywhere, I'll probably start with a phone call instead of a mouseclick.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator based in Key Largo, Fla. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion.