Travel agents

My sister and her cousin -- born within a month of each other -- celebrate a landmark birthday this autumn.  When you combine those birthdays with the fact that my sister's middle son and her granddaughter are living in Chiang Mai, Thailand -- well, a party in that part of the world seemed in order, with various relatives and friends invited.

Actually, we will be based most of the time in Chiang Mai, with a one-week expedition to Bali, where the actual birthday festivities will take place.  And we'll stop for a couple of nights to explore Angkor Wat in Cambodia, on the way "home" to Chiang Mai. 

Some birthday.  I'm lucky to get a mylar balloon on mine.

Everyone's getting himself to Chiang Mai on his own, but we've tried to coordinate the move to Bali so we're all traveling more or less in sync.  On behalf of five of us, I made a number of flight reservations today, after some on-line cogitation, figuring out which flights offered the best times and the cheapest rates.

I love doing stuff like that.  I'm clearly a frustrated travel agent.

And the dying term "travel agent" reminds me of how different travel planning was before we had the internet.  When I was a kid, if my family was traveling anywhere other than by car, it was done through a travel agent.  My mother might have bought railway tickets directly from the railway company's agent, but for anything else -- certainly any travel as grandiose as a stay in Hawaii -- we visited the travel agent.

It was kind of nice.  The agent developed a relationship with regular customers, much as a stock broker might still do today.  My mother would sit down at his desk, and be handed various dazzling brochures as they discussed what she wanted to do, and how much it would cost.  The agent didn't handle just the transportation.  He put everything -- hotels, tours, shows, bus travel --together as a package.

My parents' first visits to Europe -- as were the visits of most Americans -- were arranged as package tours, such as those run by American Express.  A bus, traveling from town to town, staying at a different hotel each night.  Sort of like cruise ships today -- everything was prepaid and pre-arranged.  The best surprise was no surprise. 

By the time I was throwing discretionary income into travel, Americans were more self-confident about getting around on their own.  All-inclusive tours were considered for "old folks."  The very young might just head to Europe on a charter flight, and then live off the land for a few weeks.  Older, but not "old," adults might want the security of hotel reservations when they arrived in a city;  travel agents continued to put together ad hoc packages of transportation and hotels, leaving the reasonably sophisticated traveler to figure out for himself what he wanted to do once those details were taken care of.

I was a pretty independent traveler, used to finding a hotel through local tourist offices once I arrived in a city.  But for airline reservations, I still always called a travel agent -- Doug Fox was a major agency in Seattle.  Actual in-person visits to an agency continued to be available for people, like my mother, who enjoyed chatting with "her" agent, but if all one wanted was air travel, it was easier to call an agent on the phone.

Then the internet eliminated the need to even talk to an agent.  I can pick a flight and make a hotel reservation in five minutes on my computer -- no visit downtown, no being placed on hold by a busy agent.

And yet -- part of the excitement of travel for folks in my parents' generation was the pre-travel experience of being greeted by the agent, enjoying the dreams evoked by colorful travel brochures and the agent's stories of his own travels, and working out with an expert in whom they had confidence how best to spend their precious two or three weeks of vacation time.

I'd never surrender the convenience of today's digital world, but I can't deny that the more leisurely and convivial planning that working together with a (now nearly extinct) professional travel agent allowed did have its charms.