8 ms·

Travel agencies are having a moment amid Covid-19

40 points by tomhoward 5y ago

neonate 5y ago
https://archive.md/Fv5fN https://archive.md/Fv5fN
dublin 5y ago
I have nothing but questions about this headline: "Having a Moment" - What the Hell does that even mean here? Does anyone hire actual editors anymore? Do any of them think about their readers? Do any of them even know proper English grammar and syntax for clear and concise writing? Why are media companies not weeding such illiterates out long before they begin inflicting their horrid incompetence on their readers?
- dang 5y ago
  "Having a moment" is a common enough phrase and means something between "doing well right now" and "making a comeback". More importantly though: Please don't pick the most irritating detail and then copy it into the thread to complain about it. This leads to significantly lower-quality discussion, especially when the detail is off topic. HN threads are sensitive to initial conditions, so this is particularly important when there aren't many comments yet. One thing we're working on learning together is how to respond to the interesting parts of an article or situation and leave superficial provocations alone. Not easy, but important for curious conversation. Please note this site guideline—the examples are different but the principle is the same: "Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Giorgi 5y ago
If you can't load archive link, it's because Archive has blocked cloudflare DNS.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- wil421 5y ago
  What DNS am I going to use now? Certainly not google. I guess my ISP, Comcast.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
    echo 212.80.216.76 archive.md >> /etc/hosts
  - srj 5y ago
    Why certainly not Google?
    - wil421 5y ago
      No way I’m letting google see every single DNS request even if they don’t save PII. Not sure if cloudfare is any better at this point. I see you work there and I don’t mean any disrespect but I have issues letting an Ad company see all of my traffic.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  Alternative: (Works with any DNS; Looks like "Reader Mode" in Firefox) curl -HUser-Agent https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/travel-advisers-delta-covid-11630442498|(x=$(echo x|tr x '\34');tr -d '\34'|sed "s/</$x&/g;s/ *//"|tr '\12' '\40'|tr '\34' '\12'|sed -n '/og:title/{s/.*content=./<h1>/;s/\".\*/<\/h1>/p;};/./{/meta charset/p;/<amp/,/<.amp/d;/<div class=.wsj-ad/,/<.div>/d;/<title>/,/<\/title>/p;/<p>/,/<\/p>/p;}') > 1.htm firefox ./1.htm brave ./1.htm chromium ./1.htm edge ./1.htm safari ./1.htm w3m ./1.htm lynx ./1.htm links ./1.htm <--- recommended :)
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
jokethrowaway 5y ago
That's terrible news. When middlemen are thriving, everyone else loses. Travel was already horrible after 9/11 and the idiotic anti terrorism rules. The myriad of different covid regulations make traveling ridiculously hard, even for people who are vaccinated, at least in Europe. I was planning a multi countries trip and I gave up after a week of trying to find reliable testing facilities for a good price, matching with flights, matching with Airbnbs. My stomach ulcer started to act up because of the extra stress so I decided to avoid the pain. We'll just book a one way flight, do one stupid test, cross one border, stay in one country and book everything last minute after we know we passed whatever idiotic rules are valid at the moment.
- beamatronic 5y ago
  Instead of "stomach ulcers", wouldn't you rather consult a professional...travel agent?
  - argvargc 5y ago
    I legitimately cannot tell if this is a line from a TV commercial.
  - jokethrowaway 5y ago
    My point is that I never needed one before these 1.5 years of collective hysteria and bureaucrats spouting new rules every day.
- fragmede 5y ago
  No one's forcing you to use a travel agent, but middlemen aren't bad simply for existing. In this case, upon a frothy sea of changing regulations, you can either keep pace with all of the regulations, orrrrrrrr you could pay someone else to do it.
  - 1123581321 5y ago
    He’s faulting the regulations for creating a complex situation that requires expertise, not saying no one should pay to navigate them.
gjs278 5y ago
the borders should actually be closed, these people are helping spread variants quickly
ghaff 5y ago
Travel agencies/advisors can be useful in a lot of specialized situations. I don't mean agencies that will just book the flight/business-class hotel/cruise you'd easily find on Expedia. But a bunch of B&Bs/Inns and transportation for a walking trip in England or some other location where lodging and transportation options can be hard to research. Yes, one can do everything by themselves. But sometimes it's worth letting a middleman who actually adds value do some of the work.
- anthony_r 5y ago
  This is very useful in hard to reach areas, examples: Prudhoe Bay in Alaska or Uyuni salt flats in Bolivia. You can go there yourself, no one is stopping you, but there's no infrastructure and basically no people for hundreds of miles. And I doubt it will ever change unless the infrastructure gets developed in those areas.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Yes. It helps to have local knowledge. And, yes, there's a lot more of that on the web than there was twenty-some years ago. But I'm still willing to pay for a professional who has first-hand knowledge about an area that has pretty fragmentary information online. No. I'm probably not going to pay a professional to plan my trip to NYC unless it has some very specific niche focus that they're expert in. But less traveled areas? Sure, if there's an appropriate pro available.
- asdff 5y ago
  Just even if its not hard to research it can be hard to book flights being sure to get the best price with all the bull airlines pull, secure hotels in a decent area, etc. It feels sorta like a homework assignment. There's a market for someone who will do that for you imo.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    My experience is that, for typical travel, the typical mass market travel agent is going to do very little to optimize other than showing you the same flights you'd get on an airline website or hotels you'd pull up on Expedia/bookings.com. Airline travel can sometimes get complicated but, in my experience traveling to a bunch of different countries, it's fairly rare that the standard travel systems break down. (And I'm not actually sure that a travel agent would get me better fares under those circumstances.)
beatthatflight 5y ago
I built https://www.beatthatflight.com.au https://www.beatthatflight.com.au which works as a comparison flight/hotel search, as well as a deals finder website with an email subscription service. It's been incredible to see the changes on traffic, bookings and my revenue tanked 97% in April 2020 (good thing it's a side hustle) - Aussie centric website, so when the borders were closed, travel stopped. The advantage of OTAs is you often can find cheaper hotels/flights than travel agents provide. However, some travel agents will then match or beat these prices. The upside of a travel agent is when things go pearshaped. A lot of OTAs are based overseas and are (apparently) reluctant to deal with refunds/rebookings as readily, and you have to deal directly with them. Try speaking to the airline and they say 'oh you booked with an OTA, talk to them', and the OTA will say 'we're waiting to hear from the airline'. A travel agent will often do all this hunting/arguing for you, and can access Sabre/other GDSs to modify bookings themselves. I've backpacked solo through most of the 'stans and South America. It's doable. But with a family, say? Or with a group of friends with fixed timelines (eg x weeks of annual leave) I'd be using a travel agent myself for some more adventurous travels.
- HalcyonicStorm 5y ago
  What GDS are you using for your prices? I did a lot of work with Sabre for years.
  - beatthatflight 5y ago
    I did too for a short time as a consultant at a travel company in Sydney. Most of mine is being provided to me via a Russian integration platform that relies primarily on Amadeus data.
- _kyran 5y ago
  Thanks for a helping me score a few great deals over the years! I’ve always been curious, how much % of your traffic is from the ozbargain posts compared to people coming to the site directly? Also is there much to be made on affiliate commission on flights or is it just optimistically hoping for hotel/car reservations?
8bitsrule 5y ago
"Travel has grown difficult thanks to virus-related complexity..." Too damn bad. Travel was the number one reason this virus was able to proliferate so quickly. That needs to get fixed; the next virus might not be so gentle.
rdtwo 5y ago
How do you find one that’s good? Seems like it would be difficult to separate the good ones from the bad

40 points by tomhoward 5y ago

https://archive.md/Fv5fN https://archive.md/Fv5fN

I have nothing but questions about this headline: "Having a Moment" - What the Hell does that even mean here? Does anyone hire actual editors anymore? Do any of them think about their readers? Do any of them even know proper English grammar and syntax for clear and concise writing? Why are media companies not weeding such illiterates out long before they begin inflicting their horrid incompetence on their readers?

dang 5y ago
"Having a moment" is a common enough phrase and means something between "doing well right now" and "making a comeback". More importantly though: Please don't pick the most irritating detail and then copy it into the thread to complain about it. This leads to significantly lower-quality discussion, especially when the detail is off topic. HN threads are sensitive to initial conditions, so this is particularly important when there aren't many comments yet. One thing we're working on learning together is how to respond to the interesting parts of an article or situation and leave superficial provocations alone. Not easy, but important for curious conversation. Please note this site guideline—the examples are different but the principle is the same: "Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Giorgi 5y ago

If you can't load archive link, it's because Archive has blocked cloudflare DNS.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
wil421 5y ago
What DNS am I going to use now? Certainly not google. I guess my ISP, Comcast.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  echo 212.80.216.76 archive.md >> /etc/hosts
- srj 5y ago
  Why certainly not Google?
  - wil421 5y ago
    No way I’m letting google see every single DNS request even if they don’t save PII. Not sure if cloudfare is any better at this point. I see you work there and I don’t mean any disrespect but I have issues letting an Ad company see all of my traffic.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
Alternative: (Works with any DNS; Looks like "Reader Mode" in Firefox) curl -HUser-Agent https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/travel-advisers-delta-covid-11630442498|(x=$(echo x|tr x '\34');tr -d '\34'|sed "s/</$x&/g;s/ *//"|tr '\12' '\40'|tr '\34' '\12'|sed -n '/og:title/{s/.*content=./<h1>/;s/\".\*/<\/h1>/p;};/./{/meta charset/p;/<amp/,/<.amp/d;/<div class=.wsj-ad/,/<.div>/d;/<title>/,/<\/title>/p;/<p>/,/<\/p>/p;}') > 1.htm firefox ./1.htm brave ./1.htm chromium ./1.htm edge ./1.htm safari ./1.htm w3m ./1.htm lynx ./1.htm links ./1.htm <--- recommended :)
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

jokethrowaway 5y ago

That's terrible news. When middlemen are thriving, everyone else loses. Travel was already horrible after 9/11 and the idiotic anti terrorism rules. The myriad of different covid regulations make traveling ridiculously hard, even for people who are vaccinated, at least in Europe. I was planning a multi countries trip and I gave up after a week of trying to find reliable testing facilities for a good price, matching with flights, matching with Airbnbs. My stomach ulcer started to act up because of the extra stress so I decided to avoid the pain. We'll just book a one way flight, do one stupid test, cross one border, stay in one country and book everything last minute after we know we passed whatever idiotic rules are valid at the moment.

beamatronic 5y ago
Instead of "stomach ulcers", wouldn't you rather consult a professional...travel agent?
- argvargc 5y ago
  I legitimately cannot tell if this is a line from a TV commercial.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  My point is that I never needed one before these 1.5 years of collective hysteria and bureaucrats spouting new rules every day.
fragmede 5y ago
No one's forcing you to use a travel agent, but middlemen aren't bad simply for existing. In this case, upon a frothy sea of changing regulations, you can either keep pace with all of the regulations, orrrrrrrr you could pay someone else to do it.
- 1123581321 5y ago
  He’s faulting the regulations for creating a complex situation that requires expertise, not saying no one should pay to navigate them.

gjs278 5y ago

the borders should actually be closed, these people are helping spread variants quickly

ghaff 5y ago

Travel agencies/advisors can be useful in a lot of specialized situations. I don't mean agencies that will just book the flight/business-class hotel/cruise you'd easily find on Expedia. But a bunch of B&Bs/Inns and transportation for a walking trip in England or some other location where lodging and transportation options can be hard to research. Yes, one can do everything by themselves. But sometimes it's worth letting a middleman who actually adds value do some of the work.

anthony_r 5y ago
This is very useful in hard to reach areas, examples: Prudhoe Bay in Alaska or Uyuni salt flats in Bolivia. You can go there yourself, no one is stopping you, but there's no infrastructure and basically no people for hundreds of miles. And I doubt it will ever change unless the infrastructure gets developed in those areas.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Yes. It helps to have local knowledge. And, yes, there's a lot more of that on the web than there was twenty-some years ago. But I'm still willing to pay for a professional who has first-hand knowledge about an area that has pretty fragmentary information online. No. I'm probably not going to pay a professional to plan my trip to NYC unless it has some very specific niche focus that they're expert in. But less traveled areas? Sure, if there's an appropriate pro available.
asdff 5y ago
Just even if its not hard to research it can be hard to book flights being sure to get the best price with all the bull airlines pull, secure hotels in a decent area, etc. It feels sorta like a homework assignment. There's a market for someone who will do that for you imo.
- ghaff 5y ago
  My experience is that, for typical travel, the typical mass market travel agent is going to do very little to optimize other than showing you the same flights you'd get on an airline website or hotels you'd pull up on Expedia/bookings.com. Airline travel can sometimes get complicated but, in my experience traveling to a bunch of different countries, it's fairly rare that the standard travel systems break down. (And I'm not actually sure that a travel agent would get me better fares under those circumstances.)

beatthatflight 5y ago

I built https://www.beatthatflight.com.au https://www.beatthatflight.com.au which works as a comparison flight/hotel search, as well as a deals finder website with an email subscription service. It's been incredible to see the changes on traffic, bookings and my revenue tanked 97% in April 2020 (good thing it's a side hustle) - Aussie centric website, so when the borders were closed, travel stopped. The advantage of OTAs is you often can find cheaper hotels/flights than travel agents provide. However, some travel agents will then match or beat these prices. The upside of a travel agent is when things go pearshaped. A lot of OTAs are based overseas and are (apparently) reluctant to deal with refunds/rebookings as readily, and you have to deal directly with them. Try speaking to the airline and they say 'oh you booked with an OTA, talk to them', and the OTA will say 'we're waiting to hear from the airline'. A travel agent will often do all this hunting/arguing for you, and can access Sabre/other GDSs to modify bookings themselves. I've backpacked solo through most of the 'stans and South America. It's doable. But with a family, say? Or with a group of friends with fixed timelines (eg x weeks of annual leave) I'd be using a travel agent myself for some more adventurous travels.

HalcyonicStorm 5y ago
What GDS are you using for your prices? I did a lot of work with Sabre for years.
- beatthatflight 5y ago
  I did too for a short time as a consultant at a travel company in Sydney. Most of mine is being provided to me via a Russian integration platform that relies primarily on Amadeus data.
_kyran 5y ago
Thanks for a helping me score a few great deals over the years! I’ve always been curious, how much % of your traffic is from the ozbargain posts compared to people coming to the site directly? Also is there much to be made on affiliate commission on flights or is it just optimistically hoping for hotel/car reservations?

8bitsrule 5y ago

"Travel has grown difficult thanks to virus-related complexity..." Too damn bad. Travel was the number one reason this virus was able to proliferate so quickly. That needs to get fixed; the next virus might not be so gentle.

rdtwo 5y ago

How do you find one that’s good? Seems like it would be difficult to separate the good ones from the bad