Travel Agents Get Angry About the Internet 15 Years Too Late
Photo Credit: Travel agents from Cooperative Travel in the U.K. receiving a best travel agency award in 2012. flickr.com / Holidayextras/Professional Images
Skift Take
Hell hath no fury like a travel agent scorned, but get real: Your market is a shrinking one. You can't put online travel and the mobile revolution back into the bottle. This battle was already fought and lost a decade ago.
It's a battle of lists, and of travel agents versus the Internet.
After Woman's Day magazine published an article on "9 Things Travel Agents Won't Tell You," the travel agency association ASTA has answered back and published its own, competing list, detailing 8 Reasons Why Booking With a Travel Professional Creates Value.
The fact that a battle over the merits and demerits of using travel agents to plan vacations versus doing it on your own through the Web and mobile is being waged through the lists format gives the debate a modern feel, but otherwise the whole brouhaha feels like a pre-Web 2.0 time warp.
Let's recap.
A petition on Change.org, with 1,660 supporters at last count, demands that Woman's Day magazine "retract a damaging article about the business practices of travel agents."
The online version of the article at issue, 9 Things Travel Agents Won't Tell You, by Anne Roderique-Jones, has attracted 1,344 comments, mostly negative, with travel agents taking
