Travel Agents are still a thing, although there are quite a lot fewer of them than there were in the 90's.

If you know where you are going, where you are staying, when, how, etc then you can pretty much do all that yourself online, no need for an agent [1].

But if you want advice, then agents can be useful. Say for example I want to visit Barcelona, a place I've never been. An agent can help me plan that (when to go, where to stay, what can/should I do etc.) They're like an intelligent Google. They'll also likely know some hacks to make it cheaper if I'm flexible enough. They can do a lot more than just purchase tickets for me.

[1] I needed an agent once. I was flying from the UK to USA on United. I live (and my CC is based in a country United doesn't fly to directly.) United _requires_ me to use the "web site of the country matching my credit card". Except they don't fly to my country, so no web site. I could book online, but no way to complete the purchase. I ended up using a travel agent in London (which is where I _was_) to make the booking for me...

For complex things they are well worth the added cost. For example if you need to book a complex chain of flights with different airlines, then you might be looking at 4-5 different sites, maybe an airport hotel booking etc. Add some time zones into the mix and it's several hours of work. If you do it yourself these are all individual bookings, and you run the risk that when you completed half the steps, something goes wrong and the next step is no longer available but it's too late to switch to plan B which was through another city.

A travel agent can basically set up a complex chain of things and then book it all in one go. They'll also handle the fallback scenario if something goes wrong. And if you are on your destination and it turns out the complex chain of flights back home is no longer available, then they'll sort out a whole new itinerary. For 90% of trips it's probably not all that useful, e.g if you fly just 1-2 legs or stay in just 1 hotel.

> I have not heard about travel agents since the 90s

Right, because "travel agents" were a front for a network of Cold War Russian spies with an incredibly high skill at impersonating a typical American family -- no accents, real kids, very middle-class. It all fell apart after an FBI agent moved in next door to one of them. I heard one of the female spies was a dead ringer for the actress who played Felicity on television.

I think they're still around, and they probably have the "on-the-ground" knowledge that's useful, maybe from feedback of their customers, or network of local friends (some small agencies focus on particular destinations, probably because they travelled there once and liked it so much they became an expert of the region, and big agencies just have partners in popular destinations). Compare that to if you check out a hotel on booking.com, the ratings are all exaggerated, even if you rate everything as crap, their scoring system will make your final rating about a 6.0 (don't quote me on that). Not to mention review-buying or faking.

As for flights, the last few times I tried booking from a booking como5any through Skyscanner where the price was 20% lower, I got all the way to entering my CC number and clicking "Buy now" only for the page to tell me, "Oops, tickets for this price are no longer available, do you want to buy for [price advertised on the airline website]?"... Hell fuck no!

They're useful when traveling for work. Not because they can find you better deals (they rarely do), but because they can save you time. You can book a flight, train, hotel and even tickets to the game/show you want to take a customer to with a single call and get all costs on a single invoice sent in the correct format, to the correct address with the correct fields filled in for the invoicing system. There is also a single 24 hour phone number to call if things go wrong where you can instantly talk to someone who can sort out whatever the problem is.

But as I said, none of this involves actually saving money

They can use Sabre to look this stuff up. Funnily enough I was in a TA just yesterday trying to book a 4 week multi-city flight.

Her banging away magical codes in Sabre was a lot easier than me trying to use the shambles which is currently Qantas’ website.

But yeah, first time I’ve been in a TA in perhaps 20 years.

Huh, couldn't that be construed as a price-fixing conspiracy?

i think they're still popular for disney since there are a ton of options for packages and i think they can also provide better deals than booking elsewhere