What Travel Advisors Do That Booking Sites Cannot

A booking site sells inventory. A travel advisor sells judgment, access and accountability. That means knowing what not to book, getting perks no public rate includes, and answering the phone when a flight is canceled at midnight. For the client, an advisor often costs little or nothing beyond the trip, because suppliers pay the commission, though many advisors now add a planning fee.

For anyone thinking of becoming an advisor, that answer is the job description. The value you will sell is the part a website cannot do, and the price you charge has to be explainable in those terms. This post sets out both, from the client's side of the desk.

What booking sites do well, and where they stop

Anyone can book a flight, and pretending otherwise loses the room. Booking sites are fast, open at all hours and very good at showing every option that matches a filter. For a simple trip, such as one flight and one hotel in a city the traveler knows, they are often the right tool.

The limit is that a site answers the question the traveler typed. It cannot tell them they asked the wrong one. It will not mention that the connection is legal but unrealistic, that the hotel is half closed for renovation, or that a two-week trip has eleven hotel changes in it.

That gap grows with the trip. Once there are several travelers, several countries, a cruise, a milestone or a lot of money involved, the cost of a wrong choice rises faster than the cost of advice. That is where advisors do most of their business, and it is reflected in the industry's numbers.

The American Society of Travel Advisors fact sheet reports that more than a quarter of all travel is booked through an agency, rising to about 70% of cruise bookings and 60% of tour packages. Those are the trips where judgment pays for itself.

The four things an advisor sells that a site cannot

When clients explain why they came back, the reasons fall into four groups. Each is something a would-be advisor needs to be able to deliver, and to describe in plain words before the first consultation.

Of the four, accountability is the one clients value most after the fact. A canceled flight at midnight is where the difference shows. A traveler with a booking site joins a queue, while a traveler with an advisor sends one message to someone who already knows the whole trip.

Access is the one that surprises people. Preferred partner status, an arrangement between suppliers and agencies, often adds a room upgrade, a resort credit or breakfast. The same trip can cost the same and simply be better, which is the strongest answer to the price question.

What clients pay for all of this

On commissionable travel, such as cruises, packages and most hotels, the supplier pays the advisor. The client usually pays the same price they would pay booking direct, so the advice comes built into a price they were going to pay anyway.

The picture changes for work that earns little or no commission. Flights are the clearest case. Here at the Travel Advisor Academy, the graduates who ticket flights for clients have mostly charged between $35 and $50 a ticket over the past two years, which is why a flights-only booking is the one where a client most often sees a separate charge.

Host Agency Reviews tracks how common these fees have become across the industry.

Complex trips work the same way. A two-week itinerary across three countries can take a dozen hours, much of it spent on rail passes and small hotels that pay little commission, so many advisors charge a planning fee before they start. The full breakdown, with a worked example, is in how much a travel agent costs.

What a client should ask before hiring an advisor

Knowing what an advisor does is half of it. The other half is telling a good one from a booking clerk with a business card, and a few questions do most of that work before any money changes hands.

These are the questions worth putting to any advisor at the first conversation:

• How are you paid on a trip like mine? A clear answer about commission and any fee is a good sign. Vagueness about money usually gets worse later.
• Which host agency or accreditation do you book through? This is how suppliers know who the advisor is, and it decides who stands behind the booking.
• Who do I call if something goes wrong while I am away? The answer should be a person and a number, not a website.
• Have you sent anyone on a trip like this before? Firsthand knowledge of a destination or a cruise line is much of what the client is paying for.
• Are you registered where the law requires it? Some states, California and Florida among them, require sellers of travel to register, and the California Attorney General explains what that means for a client there. Our guide to whether travel agents need a license explains which.

For a new advisor, the list works in reverse. Each question is one a client may ask you, and having a ready, honest answer to all five is a quiet way to win the booking from someone who has not thought about them.

How to answer the booking-site question as a new advisor

Every new advisor gets asked why someone should not just book online. The question is fair, so it deserves a proper answer rather than a defensive one. The answers that work are specific to the trip in front of you, and they concede the simple cases.

• Agree where it is true. "For a weekend flight to see family, book it yourself. Where I help is the trip with five moving parts."
• Name a risk they had not seen. "That connection is 55 minutes at a terminal change. I would build in a night."
• Point to the access. "Through my partner rate, the same room comes with breakfast and a credit."
• Explain the fee in terms of time. "The fee covers about ten hours of planning, and the price of the trip itself stays the same."

What these answers share is that none of them argues with the client. They move the conversation from price to the trip itself, which is the ground where an advisor wins. Specialists find this easier than generalists, since a client planning a safari or a luxury trip abroad already expects expertise, as the New York travel agent guide describes for that market.

The weaker answers are the ones to drop early. Claiming an advisor always finds a lower price is rarely true and easy to disprove. Criticizing booking sites sounds insecure. The stronger position is that a site and an advisor are different tools, and this trip needs the second one.

Where the course teaches the value and the price

The Fundamentals Course starts here. Unit 1, The Travel Advisor Profession Today, covers what an advisor is really paid for and the parts of the job a booking site has never been able to do. Unit 3, How Travel Advisors Get Paid, covers setting a fee you can explain and building a quote that shows value without listing your margin.

Unit 6, Finding Your First Clients, then covers answering the online-booking objection without sounding defensive, using the same approach as the examples above. Each unit ends with written assignments, and the course leads to the Certified Travel Advisor Professional (C.T.A.P.) exam.