TRAVEL INSIDER : Agents Really Can Help You Save Time, Money : Bargains: Linked by computer to rate schedules, veterans can get the best deals from airlines and hotels.

These people sold Americans $5.6 billion in airline tickets in June. Every time another price is slashed in the airline fare wars, newscasts show them huddled over their terminals, phones lodged in their ears. Nationwide, they number 200,000, laboring in some 32,000 full-service travel agencies.

Yet among the civilian public, the travel agent remains an indistinct creature. Many seasoned travelers avoid them altogether, preferring to discover their own possibilities, make their own deals, and cut out the proverbial middleman (who is probably a woman). Other travelers wonder: Can travel agents really get them better deals? Are they really free to the consumer? Do they have to pass some sort of professional training? Do they get to spend half the year testing the margaritas in Mazatlan?

And after June, when those $5.6 billion in airline bookings broke all monthly records, left millions of bargain-seeking travelers ticketless, and had agents simultaneously pleading overwork and poverty, the questions multiplied.

Here are some of the answers:

The deals. Connected by computer to airline rate schedules, a good agent can find a bargain that might take a civilian a dozen phone calls to locate, if ever. Good agents know how to get quickly to a hotel’s lowest rate, and how to adjust itineraries to take advantage of specials.

Ada Brown, owner of Seaside Travel in Long Beach (and president of the Southern California chapter of the American Society of Travel Agents, offers an example.

“A family of four contacted our office and said they needed to go to Seattle for four days and that they’d called just about every airline around,” said Brown. “The lowest rate they could get, going up on a Monday and returning on Thursday, was $600 per person.

“But we knew of a new airline that had just started business,” continued Brown. “We got them to travel on the days of their choice for $240 per person. That saved $1,440.” (The carrier was Reno Air (800-736-6247; often busy), which opened July 1 and connects in Reno on the way from LAX to Seattle.

Even if the agent doesn’t find a hidden bargain, she (more than 80% of full-time travel agents are women) saves the traveler the time of calling airlines and seeking out hotels.

Writing in the March issue of Conde Nast Traveler, veteran travel writer Paul Grimes set out to test his travel savvy in booking a hypothetical trip from Salt Lake City to New York and back. His conclusion: “Unless you enjoy spending your time with a telephone against your ear, it may be better to book most travel reservations through a travel agent, who often has even better technology, and more contacts, too.”

The fee. Most travel agents are free to the traveler, and earn their salaries in the form of 10%-15% commissions from airlines, hotels and tour operators. When they re-ticket a reservation at a lower price, their commission gets whittled down. (That’s why, handling this summer’s half-price domestic airline discounts, U.S. travel agents in June generated nearly three times their usual paperwork yet made only 14% more in commissions than they did in June, 1991.) Four of five airline tickets in the U.S. are booked by travel agents, along with an estimated 95% of the cruise reservations, 90% of tours, 50% of rental cars and 25% of the hotel reservations.

On a difficult assignment for an infrequent customer, some agents may pass along long-distance phone bills or overnight mail charges. Others may charge service fees of $10-$15 for assignments that yield minimal commissions, such as one-night hotel bookings. And a handful of agencies have abandoned conventional strategies entirely. For instance, Travel Avenue of Chicago offers no counseling and charges a flat fee for booking tickets and rooms ($10 for domestic flights, for instance). The agency then rebates some its commissions from airlines and hotels to the customer (usually a 7% rebate on domestic flights). Thus a customer would spend $500 for a domestic ticket, before taxes, then receive a rebate of $35, less the agency’s $10 flat fee. The customer’s net cost: $475 on a $500 ticket. The airline’s net income: $450, since it pays agencies a 10% commission. The agency’s share: $25, half a much as a traditional agency would net? How do they do it? Volume.

Since most travel agencies depend on commissions from airlines and hotels, consumer activists have suggested, a bonus or “override” commission from one airline or hotel might lead an agent to pass up the best deal for the traveler. Travel agents reply that their livelihood depends upon repeat business, and that no agent would last long ignoring customers’ interests. Still, an agent isn’t likely to rave about a hotel that’s slow to pay its commissions.

The training. The Airline Reporting Corp., a private company that distributes travel documents for air carriers, requires that agencies selling air travel have at least one employee who has managed or sold travel for two years or more, and another employee with a year’s experience writing tickets for air or train travel. But there is no government-mandated licensing or training for travel agents in California. If you can find an agency to give you a desk and a phone, you can call yourself a travel agent.

Many agents would like to see their field professionalized eventually, but that goal is probably years away. The largest travel agents’ organization is the American Society of Travel Agents, which counts 15,000 U.S. members, including some 3,000 tour operators, airline and hotel officials and other travel professionals. ASTA travel agents agree to a code of ethics and can be reported to ASTA’s consumer affairs department in Alexandria, Virginia (703-739-2782), which says that it mediates more than 100 cases monthly. ASTA also offers training and various insurance programs to protect agents and consumers’ money. Another estimated 3,000 travel agents belong to the Association of Retail Travel Agents, which stipulates that member agencies must do mostly retail business and operate in commercial offices open to the public.

To prepare agents for the industry, scores of travel schools nationwide offer training programs lasting from six months to four years. The most prominent program is probably the two-year sequence of courses offered by the Institute of Certified Travel Agents in Wellesley, Mass.

That program includes exams and a required final paper, and can be completed by correspondence. But it’s not for newcomers. By the time they graduate, the institute’s students must have five years of industry experience. The institute counts 15,000 certified travel counselors nationwide (more than 1,000 in California). Travelers who send a self-addressed stamped business-size envelope to the institute (148 Linden St., Box 812059, Wellesley, Mass 02181-0012; 617-237-0280), can get a list of certified travel counselors in their areas.

The freebies. Many airlines pass along free tickets to agencies with successful sales figures. Resorts and tourism bureaus stage deeply discounted “fam” trips aimed at getting agents familiar with their areas. And airlines and hotels often offer discounts to travel agents.

But take-home income among travel agents is lower than many customers may suspect. An Institute of Certified Travel Agents survey in 1991 found that 75% of responding agencies said they were paying beginning agents $13,000 a year or less. Another survey in 1989 found an overall industry average salary of $15,000.

“As a single person, I don’t really have any money left over for travel,” said Suzanne Hofsomer, an agent with Infinity Travel in Seattle. After seven years in the business, Hofsomer said, she makes less than $1,800 monthly.

Travel agents acknowledge, however, that some of their colleagues don’t need the income, and are in the business mostly to get good prices for their own trips, and perhaps write them off at tax time.

Agents also tell tales of outfits that market often-worthless “travel agent identification cards” for $500 or more. More worrisome for most consumers are the purported agencies that advertise bogus offers, collect money and fly by night--and there are plenty of them. The Federal Trade Commission estimates that one of every seven reported telemarketing fraud cases involves travel.

“They’re only hurting the integrity of real agents,” says Emily Porter, spokeswoman for the American Society of Travel Agents.

How to Find the Right Travel Agent

The perfect travel agent would probably be half nomad and half computer nerd. To find a good one, travel professionals suggest several strategies:

* Get references. Ask friends and colleagues if they have a travel agent they’re happy with, and don’t give up if the address isn’t in the immediate neighborhood. Among frequent fliers I know, one business traveler lives in San Diego and uses a New York travel agent; a leisure traveler in Seattle uses a Dallas agent to book her regular flights to southern Africa. If you’re considering a travel agent without a word-of-mouth introduction, you might ask to speak with a regular customer.

* Ask how many years your prospective agent has been in the business. Take comfort if the answer is at least two; if not, be wary.

* Stop by the office once, even if your relationship with your travel agent will be mostly telephonic. For one thing, a visit will affirm that there is in fact an office. Secondly, the atmosphere may offer a clue to the organizational skills of the agents inside.

* Ask about the agency’s employee turnover.

* Think twice before using a corporate travel agent to book a vacation or a leisure travel specialist to book a business trip. Expertise in one area doesn’t necessarily translate into the other.

* Ask where the agent has traveled personally. The agent need not have been to your prospective destination--though that would certainly be nice--but his or her answer should offer a clue to the agent’s geographical strengths and weaknesses. Keep in mind, too, that many agents specialize, especially on such areas as cruises, adventure travel, the Caribbean, Western Europe or Asia.

* Take note of the agent’s curiosity and attention. An agent who doesn’t show much interest in you may show even less in the details of your vacation plans.

* Ask if the agent will double-check air fares and hotel charges to see if late-breaking discounts have become available since original bookings. Those changes could cost the agent commission money, but a forward-thinking professional will nevertheless look out for you.