The travel agent in the UK is back from a journey into oblivion………

A report in The Times in the UK says that for years high street travel agents have been going to the wall under the onslaught of holidays booked on the internet, but now the future is looking brighter for the slicker and quicker ones.

Brits are on the move with last year, according to the Association of British Travel Agents, Brits made 69 million trips abroad, taking low-cost flights to Prague and Tbilisi, signing up for holidays on the Mississippi and into the Amazon rainforest and even rediscovering train travel on luxury expresses to Barcelona and through the Rocky Mountains.

But the one thing we are not doing is booking all this travel through the local travel agent – and the sector is showing serious signs of decay.

In 1997 there were 6,820 travel agents on ABTA’s books, but since then, despite a booming economy and a huge upsurge in travel, the number of agents on the high street has fallen by almost a fifth.

Some of that is down to consolidation among the big providers but many closures have been among the single-outlet companies that used to be the mainstay of the holiday trade. And, if you believe some commentators, unless agents change their act, the numbers will continue to fall even faster.

Stephen Bath, joint managing director of Bath Travel, Bournemouth, reckons that by the end of the year another 500 high street agents will fold. “Unless you can provide a service that the public wants, long-term, the writing’s on the wall.”

The villain for travel agents is, of course, the internet, because before the web, travel agents were the gatekeepers to an arcane world.

We would sit on one side of their desks, while they would tap into a mainframe terminal before coming back with a deal.

Galileo, the system used by most airlines to sell tickets, was so opaque that agents needed special training to use it.

Even when it coughed up a holiday, the price code on the ticket that arrived a few weeks later bore little resemblance to what we had paid.

Then came the internet and price transparency. Suddenly it was us doing the typing and agents who were begging for our business, with sites such as Expedia, Travelocity and Opodo doing all the searching for us and quickly coming up with good deals.

Meanwhile, the airlines cut the commission they paid to agents (in pre-internet days as much as 10 per cent of a ticket price) and split the savings with their customers.

“There’s no longer any money to be made selling your average bucket-and-spade holiday,” says Frances Tuke, of ABTA.  “You have to do something special and not everyone has been able to make the transition.”

The internet’s strength as a provider of travel is a no-brainer, with the travel industry  in effect, one big dating game.

On the one side are hoteliers, airlines, restaurants and tour guides who have rooms, journeys, meals and excursions to sell.

On the other side are the public, with money and the desire to get away as swiftly and efficiently as possible.

And just as the internet has proved so good at real dating, its ability to match needs with what’s on offer at super speed, has made it perfect for booking travel.

David Lock, an artist based in London, has been using the net to book his holidays “since it began”. This year he and his partner are travelling to Switzerland and he has organised everything without going near an agent.

“We are staying in Zürich and then the Alps to stay in Interlaken,” he says. “I found both hotels through TripAdvisor, read up on them for honest advice and rang them direct.

“Then I found my flight through Opodo.”  “Since the internet started I have always used it and booked direct.”

His experience is not unusual.   In 2006, according to the consultancy Interactive Media in Retail Group we spent £7 billion on online travel bookings, a figure likely to be beaten this year when around 18 million of us will have booked holidays on the net.

Yet not everything is rosy in the internet world as we are beginning to discover that booking online has its downsides.

Google is cluttered with vague and unavailable offers.  It takes time to build an itinerary.  And those “fair reviews” of hotels often turn out to have been written by the manager – or, in the cases of the suspiciously negative, by their competition.

All of this creates an excellent opportunity for those travel agents still in existence to bounce back and do some good business.

“We are looking at a post-internet generation,” says Stephen Bath, whose company saw revenue of £110 million last year from 66 offices.

“The older you are the more you have seen things go wrong and want reassurance that things can be made better.”   “It’s no good saving £50 online and then three days before you travel your wife breaks her arm and you can’t do anything about it.”  “You want someone there who will make alternative arrangements.”  “That is not going to be a girl in a call centre.”  “Travel agents are changing all the time – there’s hardly any part of the market that hasn’t been affected by the internet – and we’re changing to give the better service our customers want.”

It’s a Tuesday morning at the Baxter Hoare travel agency in South London and the phones are ringing off the hook.  Cheryl Simpson is trying to secure for a family the last four seats on a Christmas flight back from Goa, her colleague Karen Adamson is to see if a customer can get married in a certain resort on a Saturday, and Sarah Bessent is providing an airline with passengers’ passport numbers for a quicker check-in.

“We got hit [by the internet] at the beginning,” says Simpson, “but we got it back.”  “In fact it did us a favour.”  “It got rid of a lot of time-wasters, people who’d come in the summer with £100 and say ‘What have you got for this weekend?’ ”  And, she reckons, it’s not only disillusion with the internet – and fears about using a credit card online – that is bringing people back: it’s the fact that people are rediscovering that agents really know a thing or two about travel.

“Between the three of us we have almost 50 years’ experience,” says Simpson. “Customers want to see a face and they want honest opinions and advice, not just what they can find on a website.”

And there’s clearly a market for it too. “What I’d really like,” says Ann Shuttleworth, a London nursing consultant, “Is someone who could offer advice from some idea I might have, such as ‘I fancy some sun but with the option of things to do other than the beach’, come up with a few options and then organise the one I choose.”

Ten years after the internet first started to bite, travel agents may be seeing a turning point – the chance to transform themselves from shops that sell holidays to places where we can buy inspiration, creativity and reassurance. But there’s also a more psychological bond we like to invest in – the confidence that we will end up on holiday with people we like – people just the same as us.

The traditional way agents have helped us to find like-minded travellers is through the promotional material.  But now the smarter agents have realised that they can use their expensive high street shops to send out a similar demographic message.  Out are the flickering lights and tawdry posters – unless cheap is your USP.

In are comfy sofas, mood music, ethnic drapes and in-agency outlets for camping equipment.

At Intrepid Travel, in Islington, North London, “adventure” holidays are sold from a shop that looks like a cross between a Thai temple and a gastropub, with customers lounging in leather sofas while on the walls video screens play short films about Intrepid’s destinations.

The staff are tanned, good-humoured and just the sort of people you’d want to go on holiday with – at least if you were the Intrepid type.

If you fancy sharing a Med resort with some other families sunbathing round the pool, then there’s a Thomas Cook just down the road.

There’s nothing new, of course, in shops designing themselves with their prospective customers in mind, but travel agents have until now been slow to catch on.  And it’s intriguing to discover how hard it is to read these social signals on the web.  It’s as if we have to walk into a real space to sense whether or not we’re, well, in the right place.

And when it comes to those increasingly valuable couple of weeks away from it all, we need to do everything we can to get it right. Perhaps, despite all the wonderful wizardry of the internet, it will be good old British class consciousness that saves the travel agent.

Report by The Mole