The difference between a travel seller and a travel counselor
Images like the above are all over the internet, especially when it comes to travel sales. Unless you are looking at prices every single day, how do you really know you are getting a good “Hot Deal”, “Sale”, or “WOW!”? More importantly, how do you know you are getting a good value. I wanted to take a minute and let you know there are several different ways you can choose to purchase your next vacation. For the purposes of this entry, however, I am just going to concentrate on two different types.
First of all, there is a travel seller or order taker that only sells off the shelf products and many times does so to someone who walks in or does an internet search and knows exactly what they want. They may have a website with a booking engine and they process your ‘order’ through email. You probably will never talk to them. The prices are competitive, but the services offered are pretty non-existent.
There there is a travel agent or I prefer the term counselor. They may sell off the shelf products but if they do, they enhance them in a variety of ways. A travel counselor works specifically for their customer and as such their salary is paid by their customer.
The type of services offered by a travel counselor include hotel reservations, trip planning, document processing, cruise booking, monitoring cruise rates, arranging transfers, last minute bookings, long distance and fax services, insurance claim assistance, passport assistance, visa applications, special needs, advanced registration, booking shore excursions, spa appointments, dinner reservations and more.
Travel counselors also attend familiarization trips provided by a supplier or on their own dime. When a travel counselor is on ‘vacation’ they are still available to their clients by email or a world phone. They spend countless hours when not selling sitting in classrooms or taking part in online webinars. They travel to trade shows to get face to face meetings with travel suppliers. These meetings with suppliers is invaluable when they need something extra for a VIP client. It also is a great bonus to have should a client ever have difficulty on a trip through a service irregularity.
At The Flagg Agency, we are travel consultants. For a fee, we offer a variety of services to provide the recommendation for the cruise experience that best fits you needs. We offer three levels of pricing either on an a la carte basis or as packages based on our client’s amount of travel. Contact us if you want to learn more about The Flagg Agency difference.
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