The headline caught my eye: "Do We Still Need Travel Agents to Book Our Holidays?" appeared in the London Telegraph, under the byline of one Nick Trend.
The decline of the travel agent sector is quite real in Britain, and it was exacerbated when the company that actually invented travel packaging, Thomas Cook, announced last month that it was borrowing another 200 million pounds to get the company through the winter.
Thomas Cook is a 150-year-old institution. As you might imagine, the news has not gone down well with the tens of thousands of holiday-makers (in England, they call them holidays, not vacations) concerned about the stability of their arrangements.
There are a number of reasons that we should pause to consider what is happening in the U.K., and it might serve us well to pay attention to the daily stresses faced by travel agents on the Continent, lest they wash ashore here at home.
It starts, of course, with the rather stubborn refusal of the U.K. travel practitioner to recognize that the term "travel agent" ought to be buried, if not in Westminster Abbey, at least alongside the grave of another anachronism, Karl Marx, in Highgate Cemetery. In the U.K., as in the U.S., members of the travel profession refuse to accept the fact that travel agentry, though once perhaps chivalrous, is now dead. Agents of anything are now seen by the British public as clerks working in Dickensian surroundings chugging out "holidays" with quill pens.
The aptly named Mr. Trend perpetuates this image by writing that "20 years ago, many of the desk clerks in [Thomas Cook's] high street shops would know significantly more than their customers about the destinations they were thinking of booking. They could give them meaningful advice and justify their commissions. Now, many of those customers are likely to be far more experienced travelers than the clerks."
It is this morphing of the travel agent in the public's consciousness into a commission-earning clerk that seems to herald the steady decline of the travel agent population in Britain.
There is no vocational line drawn between an agent of the airlines, a headset-bedecked order-taker and those who have the talent to actually craft vacations out of whole cloth using nothing but, as the great detective Nero Wolfe used to say, "my intelligence guided by my experience."
So the media continue to lump the full-time professional consultant together with the part-time, income-supplementing, kitchen-based, commission-craving, been-nowhere travel dilettantes.
The problems encountered by Thomas Cook in the U.K. extend beyond the use of proper vocational differentiation. The fact is, the British are perhaps the world's most curious travelers, and they have a selection of airlines for which an onboard washroom is considered an amenity of debated usefulness. They can fly almost anywhere on the cheap.
But this year is a difficult time for Cook and other travel agencies, as business is down significantly in Egypt, Greece, even Tunisia and Morocco, all major destinations for the one-week-holiday-package traveler.
The British pound has not fared well against the euro, British travelers worry about losing their jobs and the length of vacations seems headed downward.
Travel agencies also suffer from Brits' rather solid sense of history. Some of the largest travel players have gone under, including Intasun, Clarkson, Horizon and XL. The XL debacle attracted enormous attention, since almost 90,000 travelers were stranded abroad on the day the company stopped answering its phones.
What other advice does the Telegraph offer its readers?
"If you want a list of recommended hotels in Majorca, you don't need to ask a travel agent. You might search Google." And when one gets ready to book a hotel, "that is best done either directly with the hotel or through a specialist booking site, not necessarily a travel agent."
Both of these snippets of advice are, of course, dead wrong. No one but a professional destination specialist can get you unbiased and well-documented hotel inspection reports. As for hotel rates and amenities, you have to go to the single largest booking source at the better hotels, the various consortia with which they are affiliated, to get the best rates.
As for recommending Google, I would suggest that this strategy is best directed at those Telegraph readers who are currently incarcerated in London's Wandsworth Prison, since only folks with nothing but time on their hands would have the patience to use this approach.
The article goes on to say, "Certainly when booking your flight, you probably won't be phoning a Thomas Cook travel agent. The most effective exploiters of the Internet have been airlines."
And, as an added nail in this particular coffin, the article notes that "as opposed to the shops that sell them, tour operators have reasons to remain optimistic."
The culture is different in Britain. Tour companies sell cruises and tours as packages, adding components that are not easily available, to produce an exclusive package, as opposed to a direct, no-frills booking. In this scenario, the travel agent is very much a middleman.
So what can we do in our own country to keep the defamation of travel agents at bay? How do we evade these slings and arrows of outrageous fortune while being portrayed by major periodicals as a species in sharp decline?
Certainly, we don't do it by helping our opponents in this battle for survival by clinging to the outmoded terminology perpetuated in the media.
When you meet a travel agent, perhaps the appropriate reaction ought to be shock and despair that they are self-described clerks on a mission of self-destruction.
Agents of the airlines? Never again. Trusted advisers who are capable guides through the cesspool of corrupted travel information that constitutes the Internet? I can live with that.
Contributing editor Richard Turen owns Churchill and Turen, a vacation-planning firm that has been named to Conde Nast Traveler's list of the World's Top Travel Specialists since the list began. Contact him at [email protected].