Any travel agents here - can I pick your brain?

I'm gonna be honest from my point of view - I travel. A lot. For both work and pleasure. I never use a travel agent. I book all airfare, hotels, car rentals and cruises (for pleasure) on my own directly with the company I use services from.

I could be totally wrong, but I don't know if I see that as a good industry to go in with it being so easy to book on your own these days.

Hopefully some travel agents will come in with a different point of view. I know there was at least one travel agent at 2Peas, but not sure if she made it over or not.

I agree she'll be jumping into a coffin, as far as the industry goes. I also agree to look into working for the airlines if her goal is to travel. If she just wants to help people plan trips there are safari/exotic vacation companies she could look into.

I haven't used a travel agent in 20 years. I'm not sure that is the direction to go. But there are plenty of jobs out there for people who like to travel and are flexible with their lives.

Honestly, even that isn't that hard to do on your own.  I planned a 21 day vacation through Europe without a travel agent.  It's pretty easy to do the research on your own these days and doesn't take long either.

Imo, dying profession. I have a friend who USED to work in it. Once the internet took off, people stopped calling.

What about working for an airline or becoming a flight attendant? My friend works for Westjet and loves it. She'll need a second language (french) and they prefer higher education but it doesn't have to be in travel/tourism.

I book most of our travel myself in and out of the US, but we did use an agent for both safari trips. There are all sorts of complications when you travel with guns that are best expedited by a professional.

I have a friend who plans and leads tours all over the world. He has a very loyal following of people who travel with him in large part for the personal touch he provides in guiding the tours himself. I imagine trying to build something like that as a newcomer to the field would be extremely difficult though.

I agree with the poster above that it's important to find your niche and then you have to provide exemplary, almost over the top service. I used a travel agent on our last European trip because I wanted some help figuring out how to travel between countries. When I was in the agency waiting to pick up tickets one day, I was paying attention to the conversations around me and all of the agents were working with people for foreign travel who wanted help similar to what we wanted -- figuring out critical details that seemed complex backed up by personal knowledge of the recommendations.

I use a travel agent for cruises and trips to Maui. She coordinates all the details - flights, hotels, transportation, insurance, etc. She is very well traveled and gives great advice to new to us places. All I have to do is tell her when and where I want to go, make the payment when she calls and get to the airport. For weekend or short 3-4 day US trips, we do it ourselves.

That said, I agree with the others that it's a dying profession. When my TA retires (she's in her 70's) I will have to do it myself.

I am a travel agent and agree it is a dying profession except in the Ultra Luxury Market. Most upscale travelers still want the personal touch and will pay for it.

Most people do book themselves through the internet. I have found they spend quite a bit of time doing so. I have also bailed out alot of clients that booked through the internet and ran into major problems. However I couldn't help them. Had they gone through me I could have.

Anyway, let her give it a shot. She can decide from there.

I'm a travel coordinator. I handle all the flights, cars, hotels, etc for a large company. We have both sales reps and executives who need travel so it's a busy day.

There are programs that do it - but they aren't smart like a person, so we do it in-house.

For me, it's a 24/7 job. Flight got cancelled? They call me. Their room needs to be switched? I get the call ... So it's not glamorous but I genuinely like most of the people I book for so it's not so bad.

I walked in to this job with 0 experience, other than booking my own flights, so I'm not sure what extra schooling she'd need - a lot of it is "tricks of the trade" type stuff like being super sweet to hotel reps can get you better rates and rooms, utilizing different search engines to find flights and working with reps from hotel chains to get corporate rates.

You can message me if you have questions.

DH was a travel agent for over 12 years, and still services his existing clients and takes referrals. He got on with an agency that provided training, as at the time it was pretty specific to certain softwares. He frequently sold over $1m in travel annually, however, the commission percentage varied depending on the vendor he sold (Carnival, Princess, etc, often set the commission rates with agencies based on their sales volume).

In that first job he traveled a lot. Free trips frequently (no spouses allowed). And he made good money. But that started to dwindle as people became more internet savvy and especially after 9/11. He could sell ice to eskimos though so he did well from the sales perspective and then kept the clients coming back with good customer service.

He worked for some very cut throat agencies and bosses and it was all commission based, usually with no benefits offered.  One boss was such a crook, he made up new policies all the time to skim more commission from his agents, listened to calls and if they didn't upsell, he'd take the commission.  It was a 24/7 job, as a pp mentioned, no matter what time the flight gets cancelled, he'd get a call to work it out. the company he's currently affiliated with is a strictly contract position, and he takes no new business from them, just his own clients and any referrals. He still gets calls at all times of the day or night. He took a call in the middle of the Zac Brown concert over the weekend because it was for a very good client, although the guy's definition of "emergency" was that he wanted to add four more people to his trip next April.

He has another full time job currently, but still works at the travel job about 40 hours a week - down from a hundred hrs/week before he had his other sales job.

He does have friends and former colleagues that work at walk in places and they make a decent living - $40-50k/annually but I don't think those jobs will last forever.

Check my Pea title.

It's a job that requires a LOT of detail work, and you do need to learn the ins and outs, but it's not a degreed career herein the States at least. If you have an organized bent and an eye for detail, agencies themselves will train you. You can get certifications through associations, too. But it's not formal classroom learning from a college level.

Most of it is commission; I did have some colleagues who charged a fee that applied to your final trip if you booked. It was designed to prevent spending 20 hours working on something only to have the traveler say, "Oh, thanks for this!" and then go book it all on line and cut the agent out of her commission. Not that it's cheaper for the traveler to do that necessarily (they might save $20) because commission fees are built into every price a hotel, cruise, Disney, vacation package quotes and if you aren't using an agent, they pocket that money themselves.

In the end, I found the industry to be one big sales game, and since I was more about customer service than upselling, I didn't find it to be the best fit for my skills.