Flight bookings: online or travel agent
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Join Date: Jun 2006
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Flight bookings: online or travel agent
When is it worth using a travel agent for company bookings?
I work for a small company employing about 15 people. There are about three of us who travel regularly but not frequently: i.e. on average about once a month; mostly within Europe, once or twice a year long-haul.
Up till now, we've usually compared alternatives online and booked tickets via the respective airlines' websites. Would we be getting better deals if we got a travel agent to handle our bookings? In particular, can they get better deals on business class fares?
(I should add that most of our travel is to trade fairs or conventions and hence fairly predictable. Flexibility is rarely an issue.)
I work for a small company employing about 15 people. There are about three of us who travel regularly but not frequently: i.e. on average about once a month; mostly within Europe, once or twice a year long-haul.
Up till now, we've usually compared alternatives online and booked tickets via the respective airlines' websites. Would we be getting better deals if we got a travel agent to handle our bookings? In particular, can they get better deals on business class fares?
(I should add that most of our travel is to trade fairs or conventions and hence fairly predictable. Flexibility is rarely an issue.)
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Join Date: Feb 2006
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On that volume of business you probably wouldn't wouldn't save any money though you may save a bit of time. One of the advantages of using an agency is they do the searching and just come back to you with a proposal. With a company of your size you'd probably just pay a flat fee per booking.
Even some of the bigger accounts don't attract much in the way of fare discount. My organisation operates about 20000 trips per year and we have our own branch of Amex on site to deal with our travel. Most of those are short haul european Y class travel and our discount on that travel is about zero, even though we're often buying full economy class tickets. Business Class is different though, we have a discount schemes with both LH and AF but it's not significant, because of our geographical position we are spreading our business around, at least, 10 airlines, if we could commit all our business to one operator we'd get a bigger discount, but we can't.
For us, the main advantage of using a travel agency is they can do the job a lot cheaper than we could do it ourselves. As for paying the agency I don't know exactly how our deal works but I know it's cheap. We've had a lot of different agencies over the years and Amex are by far the best so far.
Even some of the bigger accounts don't attract much in the way of fare discount. My organisation operates about 20000 trips per year and we have our own branch of Amex on site to deal with our travel. Most of those are short haul european Y class travel and our discount on that travel is about zero, even though we're often buying full economy class tickets. Business Class is different though, we have a discount schemes with both LH and AF but it's not significant, because of our geographical position we are spreading our business around, at least, 10 airlines, if we could commit all our business to one operator we'd get a bigger discount, but we can't.
For us, the main advantage of using a travel agency is they can do the job a lot cheaper than we could do it ourselves. As for paying the agency I don't know exactly how our deal works but I know it's cheap. We've had a lot of different agencies over the years and Amex are by far the best so far.
