Does the internet spell the end for agents?

Mole Factor winner and fortnightly columnist, Mike Stones, wonders if the travel agent is facing slow death…

"Do you love or hate what the internet has done to your travel business? Let us face it, the world wide web is a double-edged sword. But if you are under 30, you probably won’t even remember when the only technology a retail agent had was a telephone, a photocopier and a steam-driven reservation system called Viewdata.

The bread and butter of the typical retail agent was the sale, from the brochure, of a seven or 14-night package holiday – if he was lucky, the printed version would give an accurate price, and the Viewdata (or a phone call) would ascertain the availability. If a client wanted something tricky, such as a few nights in a foreign hotel, this would involve laboriously poring over gazeteers and guidebooks and, (given the prohibitive cost of phoning abroad) a text message would be sent via something called a telex machine.

Now, we can list several hundred Paris hotels, availability checked and ranked in price order, with a few clicks of the mouse. Hours of patient research, and accumulated years of travel knowledge and experience, can be condensed into five minutes at the keyboard by any computer literate junior clerk. However, you no longer need be inducted into the Magic Circle in order to perform these tricks: 50% of the population have access to the internet, and travel research is second only to porn…

Aye, there is the rub: we have been given this fantastic tool to improve our business, but some spoilsport has let the genie out of the bottle and into the hands of Joe Public! Whether we retailers like it or not, suppliers of the end product (the transportation, the accommodation, even the airport parking and the travel insurance) have realised that agents no longer have a stranglehold on introducing clients to them in return for a share of their charges – we face slow death by a thousand commission cuts.

It is five years since I gave up being a one-man band and joined Future Travel as a home-based agent – my one regret is that I did not have the foresight to move five years earlier, when Teletext was in its halcyon days. I just caught the tail-end of the boom, when my colleagues were receiving more calls than they could handle, and often had to resort to a triage system to decide which callers to quote. It is safe to say, largely due to the internet, that the flood is now more akin to a trickle.

I give thanks for the daily miracle that old (and new) customers, even those with the internet, still ring up to book. However, I cannot help wondering what the next five years bring, as the internet increases in penetration, sophistication and depth. I will continue to cling to the life-raft of customer service, but may yet get swamped by the tide of the invidious price comparison engines which, to quote Oscar Wilde, know “the price of everything and the value of nothing.”