To Travel Agent or Not?

A Guide for First Time or Seasoned Cruisers Looking to Decide How to Book Their Travel

“Do you use a travel agent or did you do that all by yourself?” That’s a question I get asked quite often.

The answer is that I’ve done it both ways and I prefer to use an agent. The main reason for this is the time savings and extra perks. I want to make sure that you know most agents make their money off commissions from the various hotels, cruises and flights they book. So you normally won’t spend any money hiring an agent. Make sure to ask if they charge added fees for their assistance and if they do you might want to find a new agent.

We all have the credit cards that give us rewards and points for travel and you can think of an agent like that. When we book through ours we are getting some added onboard credit or treats sent to the room. The travel agents have greater buying power and earn their own credits to pass onto clients.

We may only have an extra $25 onboard credit and yet that can be applied to anything from drinks to bingo to excursions to our gratuities. Every little bit helps when you’re trying to stay within budget. Besides, tell me one person who doesn’t like something for FREE—let alone FREE MONEY?

The second reason I prefer using our agent is for time savings. I do a lot of the research myself and it can be a time suck. Similar to when we get onto social media for one thing and then an hour has gone by and we are wondering ‘where did that time go?’.

I recently had my eye on wanting to sail again this year. We typically do anywhere from 2-3 in a year. When we cruised in May 2018 and visited the Next Cruise desk we knew that our big little and little little have several days off coming up in November for a school break and thought about going away then. So, we had our eye out but didn’t book. I figured I can look into something last minute (which doesn’t really exist to get a great deal and book last minute though more on that in a future post). So in August I sent an email off to our agent and said hey we have these dates open send me anything that is sailing from New Jersey, Baltimore and Fort Lauderdale during this time. Within about a day I had over 10 cruises to review. I was very intentional when I wrote as well because I knew that Royal Caribbean was offering their kids sail free promotion. It was so much easier to sift through a few different pdf documents to weed out what we would and wouldn’t want and then look into the cost of travel to make a decision.

Full disclosure because we work for ourselves we have the flexibility to be able to travel on off times of the year and I do believe this can save quite a bit of money. Prices exponentially go up during the high peak seasons for travel including holidays, spring breaks and so on. It’s like weddings too! Go into a hotel to book a meeting and the price is definitely different than if you are there to book a wedding.

My best advice is to do a little research yourself to decide where you want to go and when. If you’d like to earn a little bit more then link up with a travel agent. We can certainly give you some recommendations. If you really aren’t sure where to start, fill this out and we can help you!

If you want to read about what costs you really pay when booking check out our other posts on that topic here. Hope you’ll take a minute to head over to our Facebook page to give us a like and follow along on Instagram for all the latest Cruising with the Family updates.

Smooth Sailing