Travel Mexico Hotels

And their price isn’t bad, either: If your vacation will include a cruise or a tour, or if you travel from a Canadian airport, travel agents get paid a commission and work at no cost to their clients. Some travel agents still work for free for all services.

If you are thinking of using a travel agency, as with any service, ask about fees up front.

Marshall says his agency “would charge a little fee on a straight air-only” transaction. “But what we sell are mainly vacation packages,” he says. “When we book air in conjunction with those packages, we don’t charge a service fee, because the suppliers pay us a commission; it’s more efficient for them to have us handle the bookings.”

He compares a travel agent to “a travel valet, a free person to handle your trip. Our competitive edge is that we are on the same playing field in price, but we add in service. We save you a lot of time. If you’re a busy person who wants a vacation planned, all the work is done, and if there is any troubleshooting, we do it all, you don’t have to worry about it.”

Crawford’s company books much of its air travel through Toronto and does not add service fees, he says.

Book it now

Maxwell speaks to a lot of people who want to wait until the last minute to book trips. “They hear from their neighbor, their brother or somebody else to wait and the prices will go down. We get more people who come in here who have waited too long, and then they’re desperate.”

Maxwell advises the opposite.

“Book as soon as you can,” she says. “We tell people, don’t wait for the price to go down, just book it!”

She also advises her customers to buy trip insurance, which can range from about $60 to just over $100 per person. Then she programs the details of the trip into her computer, which prompts her to recheck the prices from time to time.

“I booked somebody months ago at a luxury hotel in Mexico, and it was over $6,000 for a trip at Easter,” she says. “I just rebooked it for $5,100. He has exactly the same thing and I just got the price down.”

An experienced agent can save a client aggravation as well as money. Crawford was in his office on a Sunday a few weeks ago catching up on paperwork when the phone rang. “It was a client who was going to Jamaica on Delta on Monday,” he says. “With the anticipation of bad weather, the airline told her she couldn’t get out for a week, and she was practically crying on the phone. I told her I’d take care of it, so I called Delta and I worked on it and I got her a flight out the next day.”

Crawford also recommends that travelers buy insurance, but this client hadn’t this time. But his intervention with the airline got her Jamaican vacation off the ground, he says.

“There are certain companies you want to be a good customer to,” he says. “We’re in the 500 Club with FunJet, that’s a big tour company, and we have a special line that we call that’s only for members. So we get special treatment. If we have a problem, they are going to take care of us, because we are good customers. It’s the same thing with the insurance company we use and certain cruise lines.

“If people see a price on Expedia or one of the other online services, we call one of our contacts, and they’ll beat the price. And a lot of people think we charge for our services, I guess,” he says. “We don’t.”

Marshall points out another benefit of booking travel with an agent. “Most travel agents require just a deposit to hold their trip, while online they have to pay in advance,” he says.

Why risk it

Travel, by its very nature, is fraught with uncertainties, caused by everything from weather and mechanical problems to human error.

Crawford tells of accompanying a tour group to the Dominican Republic last Easter. At the front desk of the group’s hotel, one of his staffers saw a honeymooning couple who had booked through one of the online companies. “It was never verified, and there weren’t any rooms, the hotel was fully booked,” he says. He and his agent made sure their rooms were verified before his group ever got on their plane, he says.

“What’s mind-boggling to me is that people who don’t know a lot about the world [book travel] themselves even though they don’t know what a good price is,” says Crawford. “If I was looking for bolts for a carburetor, I wouldn’t know a good price. It’s my job to know about travel.”

For some trips, a travel agent’s expertise is invaluable, says Maloney: “Clearly, places you’ve never been before, places where you don’t speak the language and places where they are not used to seeing a lot of Americans.”

“Some people love the planning, but you still need good expert advice to execute it,” says Maloney. “Honeymoons and destination weddings are classics. You’re very busy when you’re going to get married. The last thing you want to think about is ground transportation from the airport to the hotel, or other details like that.”