Booking a holiday online looks simple until the pieces have to fit together. A flight that lands after the last ferry. A hotel that is technically in the city but forty minutes from everything you came to see. A permit that takes eleven working days when you leave in nine.
What an agent sells is not access to inventory — you have that too. It is judgement about sequence: how many nights a place is worth, which order the towns should come in, and where the day will fall apart if the transfer is thirty minutes late.
The part you cannot search for
Supplier rates and promotions that are not published anywhere. The knowledge that a particular viewpoint is pointless before nine in the morning. Someone who answers the phone from Kolkata when a connection is missed and a chain of bookings needs rearranging while you are still standing in the airport.
In most cases an agent costs you nothing extra. What it buys back is the planning hours, and the margin for error.
