Why Do You Need To Check Your Travel Agency's Website Before Closing A Deal

Travel agencies are a nomad’s best friend, or are they? Fact is, if you frequently travel, you’re going to end up using one sooner or later. Most travelers do. They offer better flight prices, excellent hotel varieties, and even some cool options like car booking. Despite being quite helpful, a good deal of travelers doesn’t trust a travel agency. Whether it’s doubting the price is too good to be true, or the credibility of the company, people get this pit in their stomachs while dealing with a travel agency. In this article, we’ll discuss why you should indeed get a pit, but it’s not entirely for the reasons in your head right now.

The type of travel agencies you need to worry about isn’t just that unknown company. It’s actually the more known, respectable one that has millions of customers that you should be equally concerned about.

You should always thoroughly check the travel agency’s website before closing a deal, and here’s why.

Upselling and Markups

While travel agencies usually present better prices for the flights, sometimes they don’t do it equally for all. The way it goes is the agency strikes a deal with airlines to get discounted flights offers, and then they sell the same flight for more money as a margin of profit. So far, so good.

Problem is, some travel agencies upsell the flight or even service based on how smart and knowledgeable the customer is. That means getting inquiries about your frequency of travel in order to impose a price based on your expertise and knowledge of the market. That is why you should always check the travel agency’ website before closing the deal, to see if there is any discrepancy and if they’re trying to overcharge you.

Cancellation Policy

The norm is most flights have refundable tickets in case of cancellations. So, if you cancelled your flight, you’d be charged a fee for that cancellation. You might stumble upon, however, some travel agencies trying to con you out of the ticket price so they could get the entire money for themselves, not taking into consideration the airline’s cancellation fee. What will happen is when you want to cancel a flight, they’d tell you it’s nonrefundable, when it actually is. That way they get to take the entire ticket price, but for a small cancellation fee for the airline. Before finalizing the deal, always check the travel agency’s website to learn about your exact flight’s cancellation policy, so you could show them off if they said otherwise.

Imaginary Website

You need to be able to review the agency’s domain name to make sure it isn’t some shell company that’s going to scam you out of your money. That means not accepting any bull they tell you on the phone about servers being down or the website being under repair or something. Seeing the domain and making sure it’s kosher is 100% your right and you shouldn’t do anything before you cover that angle. There are millions of dollars’ worth of cases where clients were ripped off by shell companies and imaginary websites.

System Manipulation

You can’t just log into a travel agency’s website, find a ticket, and then book it. You need to be subtle and smart about it. Some agencies have been accused of seat blocking, which means the company temporarily book seats on the plane to raise prices of remaining ones –– as is the case with any plane; the more seats are booked the more the price of others will increase. To monitor that discrepancy, be sure to set your plan accordingly so you don’t have to book the closest ticket you could find. Instead, elect to wait it out a couple of days and monitor booking and cancellations on the flight; that should give you a good idea if there’s anything fishy going on.

Is It Really That Cheaper?

The whole point of using a travel agency to book, for instance, a plane ticket is because they are –– supposedly –– cheaper. In many cases that is true, but in some others it is not. This is why you should stake out several airline websites to make sure the price you’re getting from your travel agent is indeed the best offer you could get in the market, and by a lot. That is what the whole thing is about; why else would people risk using not so reliable agencies to book flight tickets. At the end of the day, if the flight ticket via the agent isn’t really that different from the airline itself, then it’s always better to stick to the airline and their prices. It is an added bonus that these airlines are known and are actual entities. So, you can sue them whenever you feel like you’re being scammed or something.