Roland Perry wrote:
> In message <1rF*VxlFz@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk>, at 10:55:57 on Thu,
> 14 Mar 2024, Theo remarked:
> >Roland Perry wrote:
> >>
> >> There comes a point when your time is money, so throwing money at the
> >> airlines and hotels reduces the hassle. I've had clients who attempted
> >> to insist that everyone fly on their legacy airline (BA, KLM, Air France
> >> or whatever) on fully refundable tickets, at whatever that costs.
> >
> >The corrollary to that is that your time spent coming up with cunning
> >flight routings is also money, and it depends how much you want to spend
> >optimising your travel. It may not be worth it to save only a few quid.
>
> Sure, but one knows in advance roughly what saving might be possible, so
> busting a gut on a London-Inverness flight probably isn't worth it, but
> London to New Zealand has many avenues to explore.
Agreed, and the time spent finagling those two tickets might be roughly the
same - but the reward in the latter case potentially much greater.
> >Travel agents may or may not help here: their optimisation function is
> >tilted towards their commission, and they may not offer you low cost
> >airlines or prefer hotel groups they have deals with. They won't just do it
> >like a regular punter would. I'm sure there are some who do, in which case
> >you'll have to pay their hourly rate.
>
> I think pretty much every traditional travel agent is now a coffee shop
> or Turkish barber.
I don't think they really exist in the retail landscape any more, aside from
package tour sellers and maybe resellers in specialist ethnic/religious/...
markets (where the airlines have a substantially offline market and hence
don't fully use open-market yield pricing).
For business travel they're still around - mostly as gatekeepers of funds
(ie issue invoices to Purchasing rather than paying on a personal/corporate
credit card). That seems to be their primary advantage to the business,
rather than any supreme skill at making travel arrangements.
The problem with using a third party is that first you need to describe your
constraints (don't want to fly Awful Airways unless it's *really* cheap,
would much prefer to use airports X and Y over Z, prefer to layover of at
most N hours in A or B but not C, although a whole day layover at D would be
ok as there's good sightseeing...), which you may not even know concretely.
And once you've done all that you might as well have just used a search to
see what's available and wrestle with the constraints yourself.
Theo
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