The Travel Agent Advantage
Despite the onslaught of offers for discount Internet vacation deals, travel agents are thriving in the Midlands. With a quick search engine query of travel agents in Columbia, about 20 travel and travel-related businesses, with brick and mortar locations, pop to the screen.
Ocean cruises, air destinations, tours and casino trips are some of the specialties offered by an array of brokers on hand to plan that dream getaway or vacation from the grind.
Matthew DeGuire is co-owner of Travel Unlimited, Inc., in Columbia. He says travel agents can offer as good a price, if not better, than online travel deal sites.
“We are here to give our clients service from an individual, from a live human being. With an online site you’re left to figure it out by yourself,” DeGuire says.
He says travel agents have access to numerous resources and they know where to look for the best deal.
Connie Bachman is an agent at Forest Lake Travel Service in Columbia. In August, she was able to demonstrate the value of an agent more than usual. She relocated clients out of the path of Hurricane Irene that threatened much of the Caribbean and the East Coast. Bachman says she has seen more competition because of online travel sites, but she has been able to fend it off because an agent provides advantages at the same cost, and possibly not as much.
“People do look at planning a trip a little differently today,” because of the Internet, she says. “But there is a misconception that a travel agent will cost more. We need to educate people and make them aware that is not the case. A travel agent can get the same price as they can get online, if not better,” Bachman says. She says a travel agent will have been to the destinations in many cases, so they can inform clients from their experiences, and that can be valuable as opposed to finding without the benefit of a travel agent’s experience.
As far as the kind of vacation that is popular now, Bachman says she is seeing some good deals on cruises being offered. “There are two or three new ships,” she says, and that is spurring competitive pricing. Cruises vary from adult-focused trips to vacations aimed at making sure children are entertained. And just as activities are different, depending on age group, so are the sizes of ships, according to Bachman. Bachman says with the price of air travel being higher this year, along with extra baggage fees and security delays, flying may not be as popular as a cruise. Bachman says the people who are flying seem to be more likely to choose South America over European destinations.
DeGuire says his agency is booking more cruises now that a Carnival Cruise Lines ship leaves from Charleston. He says Carnival has a cruise ship that departs from Jacksonville, FL, too, and that has increased demand from local vacationers.
In Columbia, Lynne Douglas, Columbia Metropolitan Airport’s director of marketing and community relations, says much of the travel from that airport is business-related. But there have been efforts in the past year to increase flights out of Columbia to Florida for tourist destinations. Vision Airlines provided service to the Northwest Florida Regional Airport, providing a gateway to the coastal towns in the Florida panhandle.
“But (Vision) air service to Florida was discontinued,” Douglas says. She says overall fight service out of Columbia has been down in 2011 due to the weakness of the overall economy. Douglas says the airport still is able to market itself as a convenient and less-hassle airport instead of driving to Charlotte, NC. “Don’t assume it’s cheaper to go to Charlotte,” Douglas says. She says the Columbia Metropolitan Airport is stressing flying local as a marketing advantage.
Douglas also says it is difficult to know how much travel traffic will come to Columbia as competition intensifies in the state’s First-in-the-South Presidential Primary in January.
On Labor Day, the Palmetto Freedom Forum for Republican presidential candidates was held in Columbia. That event drew candidates, audience members and media from all over the nation, according to Taylor Tompkins, who helped organize the event for First Tuesday Strategies. “We had 500 or 600 hundred people in the audience,” she says.
“Each candidate had 10 tickets to the forum,” Tompkins says, and their guests came from as far away as Virginia and Washington, DC. She says news media representatives came from all of the major networks, including cable outlets. Reporters from Washington, DC, New York and Houston jammed the event’s filing room.
While travel agencies may not be as numerous as they once were, it is still a strong industry. American Society of Travel Agents CEO Tony Gonchar says there is a “clear need for greater education and understanding of the important role travel agents play in today’s travel marketplace.” Gonchar made his comments in a statement after President Barack Obama, in an August speech, named travel agents as a job that has become less prevalent with the increased use of automation and the Internet.
Gonchar says there are fewer travel agencies now than there once were, but he says there are 14,000 retail travel agencies still in business.