Web Can Save You Cash but May Waste Your Time

Every day, the Internet beckons a little bit more seductively. As it does, a nagging set of questions resounds in the minds of travelers: “Is it smarter to make all these bookings myself, online or on the phone? Or do I gain more by relying on a travel agent?”

The answer depends on your Internet and travel industry fluency, your travel agent’s savvy and, perhaps most important, how you value your time.

With that in mind, here’s one case study to consider. I recently spent about seven hours in research, booking and post-booking negotiations for a long weekend in Arizona. When all that was done, I went to a few travel agents to see how they handled the same itinerary.

Travel industry researchers say there’s no real way to calculate exactly how much time most travelers take making their plans. The experience varies depending on a traveler’s habits and on the nature of the trip. If you’re flying, you probably start with a destination city in mind (although I didn’t), but what about lodging or a rental car?

Now to the case study. I booked a flight, a hotel room and a rental car. The bill, before hotel taxes and extra rental car fees and taxes, came to $517.98. (It would have been $60 more, but a travel agent tipped me off to a hotel discount.)

My first call was to the American Express travel agency that serves The Times, operating out of the newspaper’s First Street offices. Like many agencies with corporate affiliations, the office charges no service fees when booking leisure trips for workers in the building. I told the agent my travel days (Oct. 14 to 16), my destination city (Phoenix) and my preferred hotel (Pointe Hilton Tapatio Cliffs Resort).

In four minutes, agent Cooper Fennell had scouted and priced my trip: He got a $179 round-trip air fare on America West. (My computer showed the Web special, at $80 round trip, was still available, but airlines generally don’t pay commissions on those, and travel agents don’t usually seek them out.) And he got a $169 nightly rate (thanks to a discount from my auto club membership, which he had asked about) for a room at the Pointe Hilton. The best rental car rate he found was with Dollar (a more convenient choice than I’d found, with cars at the airport, not in a lot elsewhere) at $32.99. The cost of Fennell’s package: $582.98. (Like my online price, his price and those that follow exclude hotel taxes and added rental car fees and taxes.)

Now, assume that once I had chosen a destination and set other matters aside, my booking would have taken, say, two hours and four minutes. (This is a highly arbitrary figure, chosen partly to make the math easier.) The way I figure it, Cooper Fennell downstairs would have saved me two hours, at a cost of $65 more than what I booked.

My second call was to Travel by Greta in Northridge, where agent Susan Dushane took six minutes to price my flight, select a carrier, check the Hilton’s prices and availability, check rental car rates and select a company.

Her figures: $179 for an America West flight, the $169 auto club rate for the Hilton resort room, and $27.95 for a Dollar rental car. Also, Dushane’s agency charges $15 for small bookings like this one. Her total: $587.90. She would have saved me one hour and 58 minutes, for about $70 more than the trip I booked on my own.

The third test call was to another travel agency, but nobody there could do anything for me just then. The computer was down.

If you’re my imaginary two-hour do-it-yourselfer and you value your free time at $20 an hour, it might have been worthwhile to book the trip on your own. But if you value your free time at $40 an hour, it would have been wiser to trust an agent from the start.

The other option is to book your own air fare and rely on an agent for everything else. Given airline efforts to lure direct bookings with Internet discounts, a strong case can be made for that.

Depending on the details, your travel agent may not mind much. Though Airlines Reporting Corp. statistics show agents sold $8.29 billion in airline tickets in September alone, and other figures show those agents continue to sell more tickets than airlines sell directly, the airlines have been cutting their commission rates to travel agents in the last five years. As a result, agents have less incentive to sell airline tickets, and many agencies have compensated by increasing their emphasis on cruises and tours or imposing service fees (often $10 to $20 per traveler), or both.

Meanwhile, a recent study by the Travel Industry Assn. of America estimated that 16.5 million Americans used the Internet to buy travel (either from online travel agencies or directly from airlines, hotels and other travel suppliers) in 1999, up from 6.7 million in 1998.

But every trip is different, and so is every agent. And the greatest value of a seasoned travel agent comes in two situations that didn’t arise on my case-study trip:

First, if you know where you’re going but not where you’re sleeping, a good agent should be able to narrow the possibilities and present you with a handful of suitable choices.

Second, if you can’t get your first choice--either in flights or lodgings--a sharp agent should be able to draw on experience in finding alternatives you might not have considered.

Of course, some agents aren’t accomplished enough to do that, in the same way that some dentists and some auto mechanics leave you less than satisfied. And as with dentists and mechanics, there isn’t a good shortcut to finding the right one. Professional affiliations (such as membership in the American Society of Travel Agents or accreditation as a Certified Travel Counselor or Certified Travel Associate) are usually an indication. References from satisfied friends and relatives count for a lot.

In the end, however, as is so common in the consumer’s search for allies in the marketplace, there’s no escaping good old trial and error.

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Christopher Reynolds welcomes comments and suggestions, but cannot respond individually to letters and calls. Write Travel Insider, Los Angeles Times, 202 W. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90012 or e-mail chris.reynolds@latimes.com.