7 ms·
>They don't have your best interests at heart by a long shot. Huge shops like flight centre certainly don't, you're nobody to them. Their business primarily co
by FDSGSG 6y ago
>They don't have your best interests at heart by a long shot.
Huge shops like flight centre certainly don't, you're nobody to them. Their business primarily consists of selling terrible package holidays to clueless people. This is not what GP meant with "a good travel agent".
The incentives are completely different for smaller agencies offering a personalized service.
- metalliqaz 6y agowhy would the incentives be different?
- rusticpenn 6y agoThe smaller and "good" agencies generally focus on customer service, while the bigger ones focus on customer acquisition through brand name and probably do not care about customer retention.
- jdeibele 6y agoIt used to be that airlines (and hotels and rental car agencies) paid enough in commissions that travel agencies made good money booking flights. Southwest Airlines, for example, has never paid commissions. As sites like Expedia grew, many (all?) other airlines and hotels have reduced and reduced their commissions. For some people, there's still value in saying "I want to take a trip to x" and let the travel agent work out the details. But the travel agencies now charge a fee to the customer because they get comparatively little from the businesses.
- metalliqaz 6y agoI don't follow this. Customer service is useful for customer retention in small firms, but customer service is also useful for building a brand in large firms. The motivation for both is the same: selling as many vacation packages as possible.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoBrands have inertia. Once your brand is big enough, you can get away with a shitty customer service and generally screwing customers over. If you aren't a total disaster of a company, then the worst that happens is that some of your customers book with another big brand the next year... but then customers who got screwed by that other brand will try their luck with you. I'm really guessing with major travel agencies it works the same way as it seems to work with mobile operators in my country: you have three major networks to choose from, every one tries to screw you over as much as possible, but since everyone needs a smartphone, people just bounce around between the three in anger (or try to arbitrage deals). Viewed at scale, it's just an equilibrium.
- rusticpenn 6y agoGood customer service is expensive, usually the first one to go when the firm is big enough to have middle managers.