Travel Agents

25 Moments that Mattered in 2015: To make our selection of 25 moments, we thought back to the stories that drove reader engagement and sparked discussion among both travel experts and the general public. Some stories were quick blips that represented bigger things while others were narratives that built slowly through out the year. Each one, though, spoke to where we are right now when it comes to the big business of global travel.

Every industry changes, including travel agents.

The idea of integrating service-fee loving travel agents into traveler apps is at least 15 years old, if not older. Still, assuming it solves a real problem for do-it-yourself travel bookers or a hefty segment of them, there is lots of room for improvement and innovation.

Every smart travel agency and consortium has plans to better integrate one-on-one service with mobile technology. But maybe English, with his established tech savvy, can finally crack the perfect formula for bringing agents into the digital age. The hard part will be acquiring customers, especially when using a mobile app as the sole method of client interaction.

It's a bold idea and the software might turn out to be beautiful (bold and beautiful) but do leisure and business travelers at scale REALLY want to abandon self-booking tools in favor of human travel agent interaction on a mobile app? We are going to find out.

Savings for travel managers in the car rental space will likely be offset by airfare and hotel room rate increases worldwide.

Don't call it a comeback. Travel agents never disappeared; the savvy agents just got serious by re-branding themselves as travel consultants and learning to specialize in what technology companies can't provide: a human touch.

It's shocking that more corporate travel managers haven't embraced mobile technology and the sharing economy as ways to reduce costs and gain more accurate data on the habits of their clients.

A return to the commission model for agents selling flights is not the solution to the woes of the contemporary retail travel agent.

As IATA states in its report, “Airline passengers want what they want. Sometimes they want the same thing. And sometimes they don’t.”