Not dead yet: Why the old school travel agent isn’t going anywhere

If you’ve spent any time looking to plan or purchase travel online you probably know what a noisy place it’s all become. Well-designed, angel-funded websites are popping up like mushrooms after a rainstorm, each clamoring to deliver travel in a way you’ve never seen done before, and mostly patently failing to live up to their own hype.

What a dilemma.

Travel tech has dropped the ball

Since the rise of the “Web 2.0” there has been a significant increase in travel planning tools on the Internet, from taxi fare calculators to itinerary sharing software to automated booking engines, and at the core of each business model is the friendliest user-experience you’ve ever seen.

When you look at the sheer number of sites birthed in the last five years, and there are a lot, you begin to see an alarming trend: that the number is actually inversely proportionate to the ease in which we can get things done on the Web.

It calls to question whether there is simply too much information, too many choices, a sense of overkill that throttles your browsing esprit de corps before you even get to task. I like to call it “click fatigue”.

While the selection of resources online are numerous, hours spent in front of a computer screen does not always equal serious productivity for the end user. At least for me – the more time I spend researching the less likely I am to actually feel good about the time I’ve spent doing it. And while many sites have simplified (and beautified) the process, none have been genuinely effective in smoothing out a complicated trip’s various moving parts, and fewer still can grasp the trip as a whole, which to me is the goal.

A few of these sites claim to take away the painful, old-fashioned methods of planning travel – phone calls, back and forth emails, waiting around while actual people do things – but my experience is that travel consumers are still perfectly content to have those conversations, provided they feel it serves a purpose in the end. A slick UI simply cannot provide the sense of guardianship a human travel agent historically brings to the table.

With respect to the long-term travel niche, a pastime for which there is growing interest, the process of choosing the right place to plan and purchase is typically connected to a deep sense of soul-searching. It’s a process that gravitates toward a knowledgeable expert, as opposed to a team of bearded twenty-something developers that may or may not have any industry experience whatsoever.

Travel is an incredibly personal experience, right down to the act of buying it, and while our overly tech-saturated culture begs us to place our intimacy into the stewardship of a computer algorithm, the idea hasn’t been as quick to be adopted as some of these startups had hoped. Human-to-computer interaction just hasn’t replaced the desire for contextual human guidance, the divine spark so to speak, as part of the planning and booking process, and that doesn’t seem to want to change any time soon.

A recent NYT article stated that “in a recent test of agents versus online search engines, agents won nearly every time…on both price (the objective part of the test) and service (what you might call the essay question). In other words, the agents suggested alternate routes, gave advice on visas and just generally acted, well, more human than their computer counterparts.”

I’m calling it The Matrix Quotient: the overriding mistrust of a computer’s ability to fulfill our needs as travelers.

Perhaps once we’ve been shown that there can be no disruptions in the process, no glitches, bugs, crashes, or 503 errors, once everything works correctly 100% of the time, once the chaff has been separated, the automated booking process will begin to grow on us.

Until then the travel agent will remain uniquely relevant.