Why Use a Travel Agent When You Can Do It Yourself - A Mini Blog

All of the visitors, 99% of whom are gay or lesbian, to Villa Ralfa are independent travellers, that is, they have not booked a package with a travel agent.

During the course of the 'booking season', I get many enquiries from prospective guests asking for much general information, much of which can be found on the web site, and some of which cannot. Being very efficient here at Villa Ralfa, I usually follow up on these after a while to see what is going on.

Usually I find that the guests have booked a 'package' through a travel agent.

I don't know why this should be, but many gay and lesbian travellers seem to be less than confident about using the Internet, and so they will not get the holiday they want, they will get the one that the travel agent wants them to have. Usually the one that pays the agent the highest commission. Of course the travel agents will deny this, but I am sorry it is true.

At this stage you may wonder why I am writing this....Well I have just been looking at the web site belonging to 'The Leading Organisation for LGBT Tourism Industry' which has a whole section devoted on why you should use a travel agent and not do it yourself.

Having a look through the web site I find that, apparantly, none of the people listed on it are actually nitty-gritty suppliers like me. Yea sure, they have all the airlines listed as being partners, and they have the big chain hotels listed, although Radisson Edwardian would never occur to me as the place to stay as a gay venue, and neither would any of The Hilton chain.

A quick look at their search results for 'Accommodations' (why do these people insist in putting the spurious 's' on the end?) for the UK reveals that three of the entries are for accommodation agencies letting a number of properties, admittedly they do list themselves as 'Exclusively G/L' and the rest are all hotel chains.

Not one single actual gay/lesbian hotel is listed, and there dozens in the UK!

Searching for 'everything' in the UK produces 40 results, some of which do not have anything to do with travel it appears, but we get the same chain hotels, and what is this? Behold a lot of the entries are travel agents.

Now call me an old cynic if you want, and you can see where this is going.....It now becomes obvious why this web site promotes using travel agents instead of doing it yourself. Some of these travel agents listed have paid a lot of money to be on the site, so the site is hardly going to even suggest that you can do it yourself, is it?

Now why do you suppose the listings have all these travel agents and no actual accommodation providers?

Money.....The travel agents get commission, so they can afford to pay the fees to be on the site, the traveller pays this commission, and wouldn't it be nice if when the agent gives you the invoice, the commission you are paying to him was listed as a separate item?

And it is YOU, the traveller, who is paying it. Paying it in higher prices and with less choice than if you booked it all yourself.

So be independent, spend some time surfing and finding a place that you want to go, not the place that the travel or accommodation agent has on his/her books.

Of course you if you want to come to Crete you can book direct with me, and you can even find a flight through my web site, and I will gaily admit that if you do book a flight through my web site from the UK, I actually get up to £1 in commission. Wow!

And with my accommodation from €20 per night, with no booking fee, and no card fee, (because I pay it!), you can have yourself a real nice stay!