Editorial by Patrick Totty 

Editor – Like all major airlines, United’s downward spiral began well before 9/11, when they tried to lower distribution costs by using the Internet rather than travel agents. In doing so, United lowered their yield by more than they had been paying travel agents.

United should abandon Web fares and restore commission to travel agents, who still issue most of the tickets in America. Make them enthusiastic promoters of flying United.

¾Letter to the Editor, San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 15, 2002

The letter writer says it as well as we could. When you cut out the middle man, you often wind up cutting off your own nose.

It’s no news that the airlines have a great antipathy toward travel agents. Especially after 9-11, when they began selling their tickets at fire-sale prices, airlines resented the idea of having to pay commissions on such low-margin commodities.

So, The Internet became the agent-killer airlines were looking for. By persuading the public to buy direct from online airline ticket counters (or from airline shills like Orbitz), and from sites like Expedia and Travelocity, airlines were able to shut agents almost entirely out of the picture.

But, this just in: Expedia has announced it’s tacking a $5 surcharge (read: commission) on each ticket it sells. It turns out that even if it’s just a commodity you’re pushing, you still have to make money. Expedia has realized that it, too, is a middleman, just like those pesky travel agents.

Though it wants to start taking a cut, this doesn’t mean Expedia is going to perform like a travel agent. Consumers will get no experienced hands at the other end of the line helping them choose among carriers and understand the fine-print that the airlines love to hide from the traveling public. Expedia will continue to offer the same low-wage “expertise” it has been all along, only now with a $5 surcharge. 

Even worse, the airlines will construct a façade of consumer friendliness by contracting travel agents to front for them – as opposed to the old system where agents were independent and picked and chose among airlines. These agents will function as shills in the same way as Orbitz does. They’ll invariably lack expertise or the time to share it (unless their “expertise” can point a consumer back to the airline they work for), and they will work to move as many tickets as possible while pretending to offer personalized service.

The Three Legs of Cultural Travel

In a world of travel providers who love smoke and mirrors more than they do service, what’s a cultural traveler to do?

The answer is to remember that the type of travel we advocate on this site is built on three legs:

• The cultural traveler – that’s you.
• Niche tour operators
• Independent travel agents

Cultural travelers want personalized travel that appeals to their senses of individuality, possibility and intellectual adventure. When seeking travel providers, they prefer the artisan over the machine, the custom-designed trip over the mass-produced one.

Niche tour operators are experienced people who love the places and people they visit. Each one of them has a depth of knowledge and devotion that no industrial-strength tour company can match. If God is in the details, then these operators stand in angelic contrast to the “If-it’s-Tuesday-this-must-be-Belgium” companies.

Independent travel agents are like specialty tour operators – they know the turf, they’ve had direct experience with most of the places they recommend. If they don’t, they have friends in the industry they trust to tell them truths that they can pass on to you. If you just want an independent agent to obtain the cheapest fare for you, she’ll be happy to do it. But, unlike online “agents,” she’ll also be happy to schmooze with you about travel possibilities. These folks are the quintessential middlemen, people who fill in the gaps in a most intelligent way.

If these three segments see their natural affinity and rely on one another, they can easily construct a third way between the bland, exploitive impersonality of commodity travel and the horribly expensive realm of super-luxury travel. The Golden Mean isn’t a bad place to be.