My last few weeks were spent trying to find some reasonable international flight tickets for my forthcoming travel. Usually one would think that it is a fairly easy task - just call the travel agent and inform your travel dates. But to the contrary my last few experiences have been extremely frustrating. This process gets all the more difficult if one has constraints with the travel dates or destination airports and is smart enough to figure out that a much better itinerary can be easily created and is possibly available. All we need is an agent who patiently looks up various options, on different travel dates, and with different connections so that the overall itinerary is a reasonable one in terms of time, layovers at the airports and price. We usually expect the travel agent to be informed and aware of all the flights and schedules. But for some reason most of them don't seem to know or they know and don't want to try out too many options, because they don't want to spend much time on it (I don't know why...). Any person who spends ten minutes on the airline website looking at the timetable can figure these things out.
Travel agents are definitely a boon for those who absolutely don't have the time or energy to find tickets themselves. Of course, one has to go through them for business trips due to all the billing complications. But for people like me, I am really hoping that soon we will have cheap fares for international flights also available on the web similar to domestic flights. Making domestic flight arrangements has become so much easier these days. There is absolutely no need to depend on a travel agent. It would be even better if we have software web agents (artificially intelligent agents) which can totally take care of all your preferences/constraints and will never get impatient with you. I am sure that will be a reality 5-10 years down the line when we will move towards the Next generation of Web technologies and Semantic Web. Well that is my research area as well, so I am quite optimistic about it :-), but until then we'll have to go through this frustrating process.
Travel agents are definitely a boon for those who absolutely don't have the time or energy to find tickets themselves. Of course, one has to go through them for business trips due to all the billing complications. But for people like me, I am really hoping that soon we will have cheap fares for international flights also available on the web similar to domestic flights. Making domestic flight arrangements has become so much easier these days. There is absolutely no need to depend on a travel agent. It would be even better if we have software web agents (artificially intelligent agents) which can totally take care of all your preferences/constraints and will never get impatient with you. I am sure that will be a reality 5-10 years down the line when we will move towards the Next generation of Web technologies and Semantic Web. Well that is my research area as well, so I am quite optimistic about it :-), but until then we'll have to go through this frustrating process.
