Nobody enjoys the stress of booking a complicated holiday. Who do I fly with? Which hotel looks best? How can I maximise my budget? With so many options available nowadays when making a holiday booking, it can be easy to forget that you have a wealth of travel experts right on your local high street.
Travel agents spend their days organising and putting together dream holidays for customers, which makes them the best people to turn to when you’re booking the ultimate trip away. Here we’ve compiled a list of the 9 reasons to book with travel agents so that YOU can see why they’re worth turning to.
1. Better deals and prices
Online booking is notoriously unpredictable. A flight package deal that it says will cost you £350 on Tuesday might go up to £480 when you come back to the site on Friday. Even worse is finding that you’ve overspent on a holiday that is now cheaper, because you didn’t know about the offer the travel company were about to release. Going directly to a travel agent allows you to negotiate and source the very best prices for you. Booking consultants do this job day in, day out, and so they know exactly how to find the hottest deals that you might not have been able to access on your own.
2. Extra protection
Jetting off on your travels without the proper insurance and cover might seem like less hassle for those who can’t face the paperwork, but the potential for things to go wrong is much higher. A travel agent has an ABTA membership and ATOL license, which ensures that if anything happens to the supplier of your holiday, you won’t lose out.
3. Wider choice of holidays
Because everyone’s idea of the perfect holiday is different, it can be hard sometimes to know the options out there. A travel agent can recommend holiday packages that you may not have even thought of, or suggest trips or activities that the average holiday website won’t advertise.
4. A personal service
We’ve all known the pain of staring at your cold hard computer screen and wanting to tear your hair out because of the stress it causes. Booking a holiday can be incredibly time-consuming and worrying - especially if you’ve been landed with the task of planning an entire family trip away. Coming along to a travel agents allows you to enjoy the process more, as you can be greeted by a friendly consultant whose job is to make your experience of booking a holiday easier. We love holidays, and we love customer service - so it only makes sense for us to ensure that you have a great time when you come to see us!
5. Save time
Trying to keep track of the various flight times and best deals can turn a relatively simple holiday search into a lengthy slog of an evening. It takes an average of 30 hours to plan a holiday, and whilst a travel agents are happy for you to spend a while with them whilst they find you your ultimate break, they certainly won’t take that long!
6. An on-demand problem solver
Okay, we’re not quite the ones to call when you’ve accidentally popped your lilo or have overindulged on the mojitos, but we’re certainly there if you need us - particularly if something urgent goes wrong. Cancelled flights, lost luggage, hotel problems - you name it, we’ve dealt with it. It can be comforting to know that there’s a friendly team just on the other end of the phone if you do run into any trouble.
7. More trustworthy
When it comes to booking online, you never truly know if you’re going to get what you pay for. Terms and conditions go unnoticed, booking details can sometimes get altered, and all too quickly you can end up losing money on extras and add-ons you never knew existed. An established travel agents is a much more trustworthy option, as they’re based in a physical location that you can visit as many or as few times as you need to ask any questions you may have.
8. Long term commitment
Travel agents on the high street know all about their locals - what kind of holidays they like to go on, how much they like to spend, and where they want to go. It is precisely this personal relationship with the community that keeps businesses like us here at Holidays By Design open. By building up a long-term relationship with our customers, we can get a head-start on their future trips, as we already know what they enjoy.
9. Exclusive tips and tricks
Booking consultants spend all of their days checking in with holidaymakers both before and after their trips, which makes them extremely qualified on the subject and far more likely to be able to give you stellar advice. Looking for the best attractions at the best times? Our travel team are going to know what you’d enjoy. We’re also constantly adapting our holiday packages based on the feedback we receive, which means we won’t try to sell our customers any holiday that we don’t think is value for money.