Travel agents? They're advisers now, and they're making a comeback.

In August 1972, my college roommate and I set off on a cross-country adventure in her little green Karmann Ghia.

To find our way, we followed a route laid out in the AAA Trip Tik, augmented by (free) maps we picked up at gas stations along the way. 

Other than staying a few days with my grandmother in Chicago, we mostly camped, both at commercial KOA campgrounds, or in state or national parks. Occasionally - in Las Vegas, in New Orleans - we stayed in hotels. I don't remember how we found out about any of these places. Were they in the Trip Tik? Did we research them at the library? There may have been some sort of (free) national parks campgrounds book, and we likely had a guidebook with us.  

The next year, when we trekked (car-less) across Europe, we definitely had a guidebook, the Harvard Student Agencies' Let's Go Europe! I think we also had Arthur Frommer's Europe on Five Dollars a Day. 

We camped and hosteled, and - to get around - hitchhiked, with an occasional train or ferry ride. 

To get to Europe, we flew BOAC (now British Airways) from Logan to Heathrow. We picked up our tickets (which cost $206 if you were a student or under the age of 26) at the BOAC outlet in the Park Square Building.

In big cities, most of the airlines had storefronts where you could make reservations and pick up your tickets. In Boston, a lot of them were in the Park Square Building. 

I guess if you weren't in a big city, you had to use a travel agent. Which I did sometimes.

I remember - late 1970's? early 1980's? - planning some trip at Crimson Travel in Harvard Square, and setting up another trip at a long-gone travel agent on Beacon Hill, a few doors up from where I live now. That Beacon Hill visit must have been in 1976, because I remember the travel agent explaining to us that we could get a cheap flight - to where, I don't recall - using something called the "Bicentennial Nightly" program.

Mostly, however, for personal travel, I was - even in those pre-Internet days - a DYI traveler. Called the airlines to make reservations. Picked up the tickets at the airline's office. Bought guidebooks - Fodor's, Frommer's - and sent faxes (if memory serves) to make hotel reservations. 

Business travel was another story entirely. 

Companies of any size whatsoever had a corporate travel department. Smaller outfits worked with a travel agency like Crimson. 

You put in your request for a trip - through your group's admin (those were the days!), and you got a packet with your tickets and hotel reservation info in it. If something got screwed up - your flight was canceled, the hotel was wrong - you called an 800 number and whoever answered the phone (and someone always answered the phone) figured it out for you.

I remember returning from Orlando, sitting in the waiting area when they announced a long delay. Simultaneously, every business traveler hopped up and hit the payphones to get on another flight. Meanwhile, the traveling families, groggy kids in lopsided mouse ears, sat there trying to figure out what to do. Surely, they had made their plans through a travel agency. They just didn't seem to know enough to call them. 

And then the Internet changed everything.

All of a sudden, even if your company still had a travel office, you found yourself making your own reservations. It was just easier and more straightforward than going through an intermediary. (Or at least that's what we were convinced of. Sort of like it's easier and more straightforward to pump your own gas and bag your own groceries.)

And travel agents - other than for tours, niche travel, or luxury trips - seemingly went the way of the dodo bird. 

Dodo bird? 

Not so fast.

...the recent jumble of airline cancellations, staffing shortages, lost luggage, and fluctuating COVID-19 restrictions has helped buoy a profession many long perceived to be on the wane: the travel adviser.

“Suddenly, I feel like I’m in vogue again,” said Susan Bowman, a Toronto-based travel adviser. “It’s been a remarkably busy summer, and I don’t see it slowing down anytime soon. It’s been a renaissance for us.”

At last week’s Virtuoso Travel Week, an annual gathering of 5,000 luxury travel advisers in Las Vegas, the talk wasn’t about clients lost to websites such as Travelocity and Expedia. Instead, for the first time in nearly a decade, the scuttlebutt was about record demand, full schedules, and pruning client lists as the need for travel advisers balloons. It’s the biggest thing to happen in the industry since travel agents officially rebranded themselves travel advisers in 2018. Agent or adviser, the bottom line is that they’re swamped. (Source: Boston Globe)

The demand for agents/advisers at the high end, never went away. But now even plain vanilla, lower-end travelers are using advisers.

“If you book online, who do you call to try to help to get your money back? Or, who do you call to rebook the trip to another time? Those folks that weren’t working with a travel professional learned very quickly how painful and time-consuming it was to try to take care of it themselves,” [Elaine] Osgood [Marlborough-based Atlas Travel] said. “We have cruises that we have booked and rebooked. You lose count after a while.”

I understand the hassle up close and personal.

Although it was a minor inconvenience, I recently had to change flights and hotel to get down to Long Island to visit an old friend who hasn't been well. (I had a covid exposure and had to reschedule my trip.) Booking online was easy-peasy. Changing, not so. Maybe because I went through Orbitz, I had to make the changes directly with the airlines - American on the way down, Jet Blue on the way back. 

American flight change was pretty straightforward, but the Jet Blue one was peculiar. The website said to call, but when I called it said there was a cost to actually speak with someone. If I didn't want to pay, there was a chat option. That worked out fine. Still...

Anyway, I'm happy to see travel agents, errrrrrr, advisers, making a comeback. After all, they've been in decline for quite a while.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of full-time travel agents in the United States dropped from a high of 124,000 in 2000 to around 74,000 in 2014.

The bureau put the number of full-time travel agents at 70,000 in 2019 and projected the industry would lose 25 percent of its workforce by 2029. 

No numbers yet, but the decline seems to have ended, and the profession is on the upswing. Agencies are hiring, and travelers are deciding it's worth it to pay a bit of a premium to have someone to call to solve your travel problems for you.

I'm heading to Ireland next week. A DIY trip. Let's see whether I live to regret that I didn't find a travel adviser to pull it all together for me. Maybe even find the 2022 version of the Bicentennial Nightly fare.