A travel agency is a business that sells travel related products and services to end-user customers on behalf of third party travel suppliers, such as airlines, hotels and cruise lines. Customers of travel agencies include tourists and business travelers. Some agencies also serve as general service agents for foreign travel companies in different countries.
Travel agents have developed dynamic packaging tools to provide fully bonded (full financial protection) travel at prices equal to or lower than a member of the public can book online. As such, the agencies financial assets are protected in addition to professional travel agency advice.
Travel agencies also market and sell train and hotel products. Generally, their goal is to try to fit an ideal schedule onto the requirements of each specific customer.
The phrase travel agency has changed meaning since the emergence of companies like Thomson or Thomas Cook, who are now considered to be tour operators rather than travel agents. The difference is that tour operators manufacture and sell their own holidays whereas independent travel agents sell holidays from all the tour operators without limiting the range they offer to just their own product. The best travel agents deal honestly with a wide range of customers.
In the UK a group of just such travel agents formed a consortium which became known as World choice. Each agency was independently owned, bonded members of ABTA and World choice was the vehicle for both commercial negotiations with the tour operators and also a forum for best practice. In 2006 there were 700 agents in the World choice consortium of independent travel agents
In 2006 World choice, Advantage and Global Travel decided to pool their buying power and formed Triton Travel. This is now the UK's largest travel agency grouping and has over 15% of the UK's travel agency spend.
