The death of a travel salesman, charted

Despite PR to the contrary, the consumer travel agents and the agencies they’re part of are fading away, and how.

Just look at the number of searches people are doing, worldwide, looking up travel agents and agencies. The data below is from Google Trends, using multiple search terms (first chart) and using the normalized category search (second chart) as Google defines it, from 2004 till present day. The country and even more granular data gives more regional insights, and trying to find a silver lining is hard.

One caveat, though: you could argue that the kind of people who’re still using travel agents are likely not searching for them online, so there’s that.