Call Travel Agents that serve Immigrant groups - and save big!

You going to India? Talk to an Indian travel agent
Going to China? Talk to a Chinese travel agent
Makes sense?
Seth Kugel finally catches on - best practices that many of us adopted long ago...
Read on


Saving money on flights by going offline

By Seth Kugel

New York Times
Posted: 02/18/2012 12:00:00 AM PST

I remember the days when it wasn't faceless online search engines that helped me find the best deals on flights, but real live people called travel agents. Ivica got me a great bargain to Croatia. Alla helped me maneuver domestic flights within Russia, with an unbeatable price. And Fanny planned my dream trip to China with expert ease.

Actually, it's pretty easy to remember those days: They were just last month. Those trips were only tests -- tests of the real-life niche travel agencies in New York City and elsewhere that serve immigrant communities, pitched against the popular airfare websites.

The result: Nearly every time, travel agents bested the Internet big boys on both price and service. In other words, the agents suggested alternate routes, gave advice on visas and acted, well, more human than their computer counterparts.

In some cases, the agents trounced the competition. The best bargain I found was for an imagined two-week jaunt to Croatia, visiting Zagreb, Dubrovnik and the Dalmatian coast.

I first tried Travelocity, which gave me an astonishingly high $2,923 round-trip fare to Dubrovnik. Orbitz came up with $1,313. Kayak's price, $1,008, was better; Vayama came up with $862; Expedia, after much shuffling of dates, was the online winner with $798.

Then I called Pan Adriatic Travel (http://panadriatic.com), a Croatian-owned agency in Queens. "John" answered -- he was really
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Ivica Glavinic, the owner, using an English-friendly name -- and asked what I was planning to do in Croatia. I told him, noting that I could fly into and out of either Dubrovnik or Zagreb.

"You don't want to go to Zagreb and come back from Zagreb!" he practically shouted -- common knowledge to him, apparently. "You want to go to Zagreb, go down the coast, come back from Dubrovnik. I'll send you an email in five minutes."

His fare: $480, taxes included. That's 40 percent off the least expensive online flight I had found. The catch: I had only an hour to commit. If I had really been planning the trip, I certainly would have. When I called Glavinic later and revealed that I was a journalist, he said those deals don't always pop up -- I had been lucky. "But I can always get you a better deal" than online sites, he added.

I don't think his boast was an idle one. In years of booking trips to Brazil through BACC Travel, a Brazilian agency based in New York (212-730-1010; http://bacctravel.com), I can't remember a time they couldn't at least slightly beat the online price.

Other tests of Chinese, Russian, Brazilian, Ecuadorean and Indian agencies resulted in victories or virtual ties with my invented travel scenarios. Only in one case -- a flight to Manila, Philippines -- did the Web score a definitive victory over a storefront agency, and then only by about $50.

As my itineraries got more complicated, the search engines had even more trouble keeping pace with the agencies. At Delgado Travel, an Ecuadorean-owned agency (800-335-4236) with branches across the United States, I asked about a trip that included Quito and Cuzco, Peru. An agent quoted me $1,213, beating (just barely) the $1,294 route I found using ITA Software, a site that finds the least expensive flights but does not book them. Vayama was second, at $1,386.

When I went to Kayak and reverse-engineered the specific dates and flights I got at Delgado, I could indeed match their price. But most of the time I couldn't. That's because many of the agencies are consolidators, meaning they negotiate discount rates with airlines on specific routes in exchange for a promise of volume sales.

It is generally true that the online engines will find the best domestic coach fares -- although even that can get complicated. Southwest flights, for example, don't appear on most search engines.

I took things up a notch with even more complicated itineraries in Russia and China. My Russian trip included Moscow, Kazan and Irkutsk. My Chinese route was Beijing, Chengdu and Hangzhou.

For the Russian plan, the search engine results varied widely, from $5,199 on Kayak to $1,373 on Vayama. Then I contacted Bella's Travel (212-730-1010) in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn's Russian enclave. The receptionist asked "Do you have a visa?" I hadn't thought of that, and it turns out they are tricky to get -- but Bella's could help, for $70 in addition to the visa fee. She then sent me over to a very pleasant agent named Alla, who conjured up a $1,301 fare. Total time spent: 15 minutes, much less than I spent online.

And you don't have to live in New York -- just seek out the agents online. A clue you've come to the right place: The website looks as if it was designed a decade ago, does not have online searching and directs you to call a phone number associated with a real address.

I tried just that with an online search for Chinese travel specialists and came upon USChinaTrip.com (909-895-8858). I emailed them with my dates and cities, and they got back to me within a few hours. Their price: $1,369. That beat out, although barely, a deal found by Fanny at Joy World Travel in Queens (718-460-5100). However, it soundly bested the online search engines again, which would have charged me $356 more for the dubious privilege of dealing with a machine instead of a human.