Why Travel Agents Matter Today, For You

This is not a clickbait title, honestly. It can be any day and age, really. Pick your choice – pre-pandemic, during the pandemic and its resurgence, now or… pre-Internet.

We’re not going into the history lesson here. With booking engines and travel portals offering deep discounts, it’s an irresistible combination – save money on holidays by combining timely airfare bookings with advance hotel promotions. People have saved almost a third of their travel budgets using these hacks. We’re sure you must have, too. 

And as travellers ourselves, we believe in the fun of doing travel research, finding out points of interest and the cheapest deals offering the most-est. Nobody hates money saved, ever. 

Here’s a tip on how to get that extra edge matching the best prices on all travel portals. Ready?

Travel companies, and we’re talking every big brand you know, uses cookies and instantaneous browsing knowledge with targeted adverts. And you’re right, the advertisements promise rock-bottom fares and 60% off, but it never really is so for anything that you’ve taken a shine for. And the more you search, the more insistent the ads and lesser discounts you get. Weird.  

Beating Travel Websites: Getting the Best Travel Deals Solo!

Here’s how to beat all this? This is for one session of travel research and bookings. First, use a VPN, and open separate incognito windows in different browsers. Find the best hotel, the perfect airfare you’re looking for, airport transfer rates, meal plans, tours and note all of them down. Close all tabs and shut down the VPN. Now, open the browser you normally use and blaze a singular path of booking together the flights, the hotel, and other ancillary items. Ignore ads, promotions and offers and lock those prices up. 

It’s a little much, but this way offers the most chance of saving money. Airline seats and hotel rooms get snapped up lightning fast. And as you very well know, non-refundable and partially-refundable tickets are always a minor worry. What if you miss your flight because of a flat tire? And heavens forbid if you fall ill! Thar goes the holiday, into the deep…

Another thorn. How every site differs in presenting information. Up till a few years ago, travel websites used to show total money to be spent in a single totted up number. Isn’t it an absolute pain that now most of the big sites show cost per day per traveller until the last payment page? That’s downright irritating, even if you can go into the app or site settings and flip the switch back to ‘normal view’. And forget about using travel vouchers and gift cards. Some sites and companies make it so hard to redeem them – ‘you can use this coupon on a Wednesday, using <insert obscure bank> credit card and the kids will be sent separately!’ Kidding – or are we?

The Logic of using a Travel Agent

Enter travel agents. Old-school. Hideaway Holidays has been creating South Pacific holiday packages for nigh 40 years now. Our years of building together holidays and learning from them gives us two pieces of vital information. One, we’ve a very good idea of what different traveller segment look for, want, and book in different holiday requirements. Two, every travel booking is slightly unique. The means and the mode might stay the same, but people change, their needs vary and the holiday becomes unique to them. As one of our Specialists put it, ‘All the holiday packages in the world, no matter how complex, are cookie-cutter. How you change them makes them yours.”

Subject matter awareness: South Pacific ‘Specialists’

The travel industry is as alive and nascent as any other. Rules change (remember how crazy flying during COVID was?), situations flip from nice to nasty (someone lost their passport on a hiking expedition, don’t ask why they took theirs!), rooms may turn out unbooked, 128 other things and situations can happen. Now, this may be new to you on your first time holiday to Fiji, but our South Pacific Specialists have seen and dealt with most of everything. Lost flights, missed transfers, oversleeping while waiting for planes, missing tickets, you name it. 

Plus, for any of our South Pacific destinations, we know the country, the hotels and resorts, their reviews, the tours on tap, the transfer companies, places to go, and what not. It’s our job to know and being in the know. 

Your single point of contact – Alerts, Legalese and Everything in Between

Your travel agent is the human connection, your single point of contact for everything before, during and after your holiday. Whatever your questions, doubts, misconceptions, alarms and problems – throw them our way. You don’t need to scroll through a website’s legal terms and conditions to get to refunds and rebookings. Just call your assigned agent – he/she will take care of everything. Flights change, resorts may get damp and shift your rooms, tours may get cancelled. Your agent will know what to do and inform you as soon as the airline, hotel or tour operator shouts out. The point is, on our holiday, you should not be checking your phone to keep tabs on everything. Relax. 

Comfort and Convenience: I’ll Call My Agent

As one of our customers said to us, “I just got tired of looking at all the holiday packages. Even yours. I just wanted to talk to someone that this is what I want. It’s slightly different, and I don’t want to learn using four new websites’ tricks to get there. All I want is to speak to someone, tell them what I want, and they can stitch the holiday together. It’s that simple, but it’s not so simple anymore!” And she wasn’t even a Boomer, just a young mum with two kids looking for an extremely budget-friendly beach getaway.

That’s why you need a travel agent. Sometimes, old-school is the option with the most savings and peace of mind. Head over to our South Pacific holidays, if we’ve hit a chord. We’ve Fiji holidays, Cook Islands getaways and more. And if you’ve a sudden urge to talk to our South Pacific Specialists for a holiday, just call us at 1300 991 751!