WASHINGTON — In the Internet age, it’s easy to book vacation travel and accommodations yourself. But if you’re planning a “destination” vacation, don’t rule out using a travel agent.
“If you’re going someplace where it’s really difficult to plan on your own because you’ve never been there before and you don’t know where to go and you don’t know when to go there and what to avoid and what not to avoid,” says Kevin Brasler, executive editor of Checkbook.org, you’ll want to bring in a pro.
Washington Consumers’ Checkbook has recommendations for choosing the right travel agent.
“The first question to ask is: Have you been there and how recently have you been there and how many clients do you send there,” Brasler says.
Brasler says even agents who haven’t personally visited a location might be particularly useful, if they frequently book client trips to the destination and have developed on-site expert contacts.
Red flags of concern about travel agents include slow responses to inquiries and a seeming preference to make bookings with a specific chain or supplier.
Find rankings of the best local travel agencies here.
And if you haven’t decided yet when or where to go on vacation, Checkbook recommends a cool tool to help you decide.
Say you have a flexible schedule and can request to take vacation any time between August and October. You can plug that time frame into the Skyscanner search engine and it will pull up the least expensive airfare to multiple destinations.
“It’ll start showing you the best airfares for that time period for anywhere. It’ll show you for Paris, London, Orlando, San Francisco — whatever.”
Brasler says you also can search a specific destination to find the cheapest times to fly.
“You can tell it, I want to go to San Francisco and then in the date field you can put ‘anytime’ and it’ll show you the cheapest time to fly there,” she says.
When you’re choosing both a destination and a potential travel agent, it pays to do a little research yourself. Knowing the basics will help you avoid bad trip decisions and help you spot an agent who is incompetent or lazy.
