Booking on your own VS. Travel Agent to Alaska

[Dawnyy99]

I have been on 4 cruises and have booked each one myself. Which I have recieved very reasonable prices.

 

We were looking into an Alaska Cruise June 2011 and contacted a travel agent. When I put the same itinerary the travel agent recommended into the website I got a price a few hundred dollars cheaper than what she gave us.

 

I was just wondering in everyones experience, Whats the benefit of going through a travel agent???

[Dani24]

A good travel agent will be able to get you a price that's better than the cruiseline. It sounds like the TA you spoke to was probably not very good. At the very least, they should be able to get you the same price that the cruiseline offers.

 

Also, sometimes the price can vary depending on whether the TA is doing a general search for fares, or if they're using your personal info (i.e., your state for geographically based discounts, or your cruiseline member number for past passenger discounts or special offers the cruiseline has made available to you).

 

Typically, the benefit of using a TA is that the fare is less than what you'd get from the cruiseline (with the exception of a few cruiselines that don't allow discounting). They often throw in "extras" such as free onboard credit, or other goodies such as a coupon book, chocolate covered strawberries, wine, etc. Some TAs can offer larger discounts than other TAs because they actually cut into their commission a little to lower the price (they make up for this by doing a higher volume of bookings, because they attract more people with their lower prices). Also, a good TA is indispensible when you have a problem or a question as they can take care of fixing things, or researching info for you.

[mizLORInj]

We use a TA through a warehouse club, and the only lines where price is the same as booking direct is Celeb and RC (not counting the OBC the TA offers). Otherwise we always pay less than the cruiseline directly, sometimes even with an OBC.