O.T. Travel agents

Hi guys, with the internet a huge part of our lives, how many of you still use travel agents for vacations? For example, I am planning a dive trip next winter, it's very easy to research destinations on trip adviser, plug in your dates and everything is right there, just a few clicks away. You may make reservations and plan flights all while sitting in my recliner with my laptop. Big question, is it safe? just because I booked a trip and paid for it, also have conformation, how do I know when I get there the person behind the counter does not give me a runaround? especially when there could be a language conflict. I have done very small trips with mixed results, but being at the doorstep of a resort in the Carribean without a room could be an issue. How would a travel agent help you while traveling? I only used one years and years ago, before internet days. I have a feeling they do exactly what I would do, and charge me a percentage more. Please share horror stories, or great results.

Until a couple of years ago we booked all our trips through Internet. Now for some trips (esp., all inclusive) we started using help of a travel agent. We didn't have any problems either way. And booking with a travel agent is definitely not more expensive for us. Just less work. Occasionally, she can pull a deal better than we could just because she is always on top of it.

P.S. When choosing an agent, talk to people to get a recommendation. Not all agent are equally good. If you want, we can give you our agent's phone#: she is in Chicago suburbs. I don't know where in WI you're.

I am in the West Bend area, thank you for your experiences, we have a good recommendation close to home here. You may be right, I think some travel agents buy or reserve large blocks of the popular places and can get them cheaper and pass a little along to the customer, but that is just a guess.

I'd agree that it absolutely depends on the specific travel agent but another thing to remember is that most of the sites that funnel aggregate data into something useful (Kayak, Orbitz, cheaptickets, etc) miss something useful, I know Kayak and Cheaptickets don't post Southwest flights and none of them will post multiple airline trips if the airlines involved don't have a bag handling agreement with each other, both of which can save a person significant amounts of money. I'd imagine that knowing a few of these tricks can make things significantly cheaper for the customer who will save more money and be very appreciative even with a modest markup.

my Girlfriend and I went to Costa Rica this summer and were having trouble figuring out the second half of our trip to Areal. first half was to Nosura, which I highly recommend. Anyways, we went to a travel agent and it worked out OK, but it was not like the old days were they really knew the areas. We probably over paid for a few things, but then we did get an awesome deal on a resort hotel.
in contrast, back in 2003, my ex and I went to Italy for 3 weeks. a family friend was just retiring from being an agent her entire career and set up a super trip and had been to most if not all of the places herself. Her experience made a hugh difference. I suspect that does not happen anymore with the competition with online services taking the profit out of the business.

it depends what your time and effort is worth to you. you can easily spent a couple of hours rearching for the best deal. last time i called an agent and got the booking a few hours later. it was not nocticably mor expensive.

then it turned out i couldnt get a taxi at the time i needed to leave. so i called the agent on the night before and he aranged the flight for the following day. soon after that junior needed to cancel/postpone a flight because he was unable to get a certificate on time. he spent several hours on the phone talking to robots and in the end got billed for the flight, they said he never canceled it, so he paied twice.