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Features-Which Way Decision

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Featured photo above: Borobudur Temple, Central Java, Indonesia.

Many people use travel agents – so should you use one for your next trip? (Note this isn’t about guides or group tours which is another topic altogether.)

Pros of using an agent:

  • Can give great but unobvious suggestions
  • Help plan from the mundane to more exclusive experiences. May be able get hard-to-find tickets
  • Help to recover from any snafus
  • With a few exceptions, can save time while on the trip

Cons:

  • May/often cost more
  • Need to prepay, cancellation penalty
  • Lock into an itinerary

More than most decisions, whether to use an agent can be tricky! Although I generally plan all aspects of my trips, I did use a couple agents on a recent 4-week trip to Southeast Asia and learned a few things.

Here are 3 phases of a trip where an agent can be particularly helpful: Itinerary planning, Logistics and During the trip.

  1. Itinerary planning

I suppose there are people who only have a vague idea of where they want to go – maybe someplace warm and costs <$1000 for a week and then seek suggestions from an agent. I’m not one of those folks, so I don’t have much insight there.

First, based on books, Internet research etc., I came up with a sketch of an itinerary. Then fleshing out the plan is when I might get help.

On my trip to SE Asia, I knew I wanted to fly into Bangkok, visit Chiang Mai, Luang Prabang, a nice beach somewhere, and then fly out of Vientiane for Indonesia. I looked at some sample itineraries in guidebooks and on tour companies’ websites. I then contacted a SE-Asia-based agency that customizes trips to see what they can offer. 

Wat Phan Tao, Chiang Mai, Thailand
Wat Chiang Mun, Chiang Mai, Thailand.

After some back-and-forth via emails, the agent suggested Phuket, Vang Vieng (a convenient stop between Luang Prabang and Vientiane) and some great activities: bicycling in Chiang Mai and hot air ballooning in Vang Vieng, which I probably wouldn’t have thought of. Also helpful is the suggestion of how many days to stay at each place, given my general priorities. When the itinerary got squeezed, I loved her suggestion to only spend a half-day at Vientiane. Though it was a pleasant city, for me the duration was sufficient.

Hot air balloon over Vang Vieng, Laos.

However, I did override her suggestion on where in Phuket to stay (Karon instead of Rawai Beach) and the order of the cities – I found a direct flight from Chiang Mai to Luang Prabang which cut the travel time from 6+ hours to less than 2.

While planning for the Indonesia leg of my trip, I asked another agent who specialized in Indonesia whether there was anything else to see on the long trip (10+ hours by train+car) from Yogyakarta to Mount Bromo, and she suggested a couple of waterfalls. I might have seen them mentioned in some tour descriptions but those tours often pad itineraries with minor attractions (“This is the 5th largest egg-shaped boulder in the area!”) to make the tours seem more worthwhile. The Madakaripura Waterfall turned out to be a highlight of the trip despite not being even mentioned in the 800+ pages of the Lonely Planet Indonesia guidebook! 

Madakaripura Waterfall, the tallest one (not pictured) is the second highest waterfall in Indonesia.

Again, I did veto the suggestion of an overnight stay at Surabaya. I just spent a couple of hours there and guidebooks are correct that it is a place for stopping by on the way to somewhere else. However, the agent was right to recommend staying a couple of days at the island of Gili Air as opposed a very rushed day trip (she cast doubt on whether it was even possible to do a day trip).

One of beaches on the island of Gili Air, Indonesia.

2. Logistics

The Thailand-Laos agent told me that the flights would be cheaper if I booked them myself – this proved to be a headache later on, as I will discuss in the during-the-trip section. I also know that airlines play a lot of pricing games, err, have “sophisticated pricing algorithms” that take into account where in the world that the booking originates from. I expect in certain situations, the agent would be able to access lower fares.

Even with most lodging bookings available on the Internet, it can still be a hassle comparing hotel locations, features, availability, reviews and pricing. I had intended to have the agent book all the hotels for me, but it turns out for Thailand/Laos, it seemed to be cheaper if I booked directly. Being not especially picky about hotels, it’s ironic that I ended up picking all the lodgings. 

Indonesia was much cheaper and so I just let the agent book all the hotels and the one domestic flight. When a name-brand Marriott hotel goes for as low as $28/night (I didn’t end up staying there as I skipped Surabaya), I didn’t particularly worry about any slight price differences.

I also let the agents book the train tickets which turned out to be a good idea. I didn’t realize that the demand outstripped the supply for Laos’s relatively new high-speed railway so tickets were effectively available only through brokers. On top of that, they quickly sell out so I was glad that I let the agent handle it. 

A rafting traffic jam. One of many modes of transportation on my trip. Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Lastly in terms of transportation, the agents arranged transport to/from the airports. Sure, pre-booking incurs a  price premium, but call it peace-of-mind. With those few dollars, you could avoid the gauntlet of hustlers at the airport after a tiring journey or a flakey driver who (perhaps not terribly unreasonably) decided to get more sleep instead of picking me up at 5am from the hotel.

Beyond hotels and transportation, a good agent can also book with good local operators for tours so you hopefully don’t need to worry whether the snorkeling boat is seaworthy or the guides are knowledgeable.

Of note, except for flights, the bookings I made do not require prepayment. However, going through an agent, I needed to prepay for most of the trip, with the cancellation penalties getting quite severe (to the point of zero refund) the closer it got to the departure date. Travel insurance is not standard practice for me but would be wise if going through an agency for much of the trip.

3. The experience and support while on the trip

When an Indonesian domestic flight was cancelled with only a couple days notice, the agent quickly reserved a replacement flight, informed me of the cancellation and made sure I was ok with the new flight. This is in stark contrast with the flights I booked myself. Two flights were outright cancelled and two more were shifted by 12+ hrs which would cause me to miss connections. I spent hours on the phone and queued up in 4 separate lines at the airport to straighten out the mess. How I wish I had an agent then. (I wouldn’t go so far as to recommend you get an agent to book flights in general as this is probably a special situation of post-COVID travel in SE Asia. In my decades of travel, I haven’t experienced anything like chaos wrought by airlines willy-nilly messing with schedules.)

If you do go with an agent, I’d recommend one that has round-the-clock urgent support (in an agency, the agents often rotate off-hour support on a shared WhatsApp chatline.) During the complicated flight snafu mentioned above, I ended up at the Jakarta airport at around 11pm and needed to wait ~7 hrs for a connecting morning flight. Jakarta wasn’t a planned stop so I had no idea what my options were – a quick conversation on the WhatsApp support line gave me the needed info on local lodging and the associated transport choices. 

Another pleasant surprise was that the agent informed me on the day before I was to visit Borobudur Temple, that they started letting tourists climb onto the monument again. However, there is a surcharge and an attendance cap and so I instantly agreed to pay a bit extra and getting up at 5:30am. As expected, it was a top-5 highlight of my 4-week trip. The top of the monument had been closed due to a combination of COVID and UNESCO demanding a sustainable visitor plan. They conducted a trial in early 2023 with visitors being compelled to wear monument-provided sandals. As my agent hilariously explained: rain, cheap sandals and smooth stones don’t go well together. (I wore improved sandals – it wasn’t the rainy season so I can’t vouch whether they will shut things down when it gets wet again.)

Borobudur Temple, Central Java, Indonesia.

One downside of having agents arrange the transport is that one always gets picked up way too early to go to airports or train stations. This was true with multiple agents on multiple continents. I would get up in the wee hours of the morning, frantically finish packing and race out the door only to be forced to “relax” for 1-2 hours in an uncomfortable chair waiting for said plane/train. If I was lucky, I could find some breakfast as I often left the hotel way before it started serving any food. (Although one hotel was nice enough to buy a tasty breakfast in a box for me to grab on my way out – though not a luxury hotel, it was nice touch that might contradict my article on fancy hotels.)

I get it, as if I was an agent, it would be a nightmare if a client misses a flight. No one would be happy and the ripple effect might require days of adjustments. Indeed, one time a driver got caught up in festival-caused traffic jam and was late by 1/2 hr but there was enough of this buffer time to make my flight. Also, each agent has their own idea of how much margin to leave and one agent amusingly left maybe a 5 min buffer in his recommendation. Knowing the pains I went through get my flights in order for the third time, I chose to leave 30min earlier than he had suggested! In the end, he was right, I didn’t need to leave early.

Yes, I could have arranged those transports on my own but in foreign lands with tight schedules, I’m willing to pay the relative small price to be assured of good, punctual drivers. 

Recommendation: This one is tough as it really depends on how much you enjoy the trip planning and arrangement, but if your travel style is close to mine, I would say use a local agent to help on any complicated trips.