Adventures with Travel Agents

Two more days to work!

I should mention that I'm still employed at "Ballard Pterodactyl," and still on a contract basis, which means that my two weeks off will be unpaid. That's okay; we've saved up enough to cover both the trip and our butts when we get back. But it adds a tinge of reckless uncertainty to declarations of joy at the approaching end of work.

We'll be travelling for ten days, and not to give too much away in advance, but here's our basic itinerary: five days on the Big Island, followed by five on Kauai. On the Big Island we'll be staying at a hotel near the town of Kailua, on the Western side of the island; on Kauai we'll be staying at a condo on the beach at Poipu, Southern side. Those familiar with Hawaii can feel free to ooh and aah at these places, or shake your heads at our sad naivete, whichever is appropriate; we really don't know anything about where we're going. As far as I can tell from peering down at them with Google Earth, both locations look pretty.

At this point I confess that we arranged our trip through a travel agent. We gave them our dates and budget and left many of the details up to them. Now, I am NOT a big fan of travelling this way -- it runs against the grain of my do-it-yourself traveller heart (and the advice of my more adventurous friends) -- but, well, we'd used this particular agency once before with good results, and it was sort of the path of least resistance. The agency, which I'll call "Little Atlantis Travel," is in a North Seattle artery of run-down retail, alongside sad thrift stores and biker steak bars, and with its Bauhaus glass front opening to a fluorescent carpeted box of front-facing desks, its faded blue posters and big plastic globes, it looks like it's endured unchanged from the 1960s, complete with personnel. But the latter have experience and good contacts and basically seem to know what they're doing, and they wound up arranging a great vacation for us.

To break down our experience with them, it was: first funny, then infuriating, and finally positive.

The funny part happened because originally we were thinking of taking our vacation in Mexico, at some big resort along what they call the Mayan Riviera in Yucatan. In the immediate aftermath of Sara's mother's death, all we really wanted was a beach, ready alcohol, and a lot of pampering. As the months went by we recovered a little, however, and started to wonder what we would DO there. We realized we were open to other options. So we went down to Little Atlantis and said, "We want to take a ten-day vacation in the Fall, preferably involving a beach; where should we go?" It was a slow day at the agency and for an hour or so all the clerks cheerfully gathered ruund, piling ideas and pamphlets on us. Greece! A Mediterranean cruise! Costa Rica! Egypt! Israel! Hawaii! We circled the tropical globe a few dizzying times, and came home laden with a stack of glossy brochures and shrink-wrapped travel DVDs. A few dreamy days later we had settled on Hawaii, and it seemed natural to go back and let Little Atlantis recommend further.

That visit was on the Thursday before Labor Day weekend; we chose our islands, and we arranged to return on Tuesday, when they'd have picked out some options for us.

Then, out of the blue, they called Friday afternoon. They said they'd found a great airfare but they had to book it that day, and would we please give them $1000 down payment on the whole package. I couldn't believe my ears. WHAT "whole package?" Where were we staying? For how long? Were we supposed to pay up front for options we hadn't even been told about? Oh, they had chosen some hotels; at my request they gave me the names. Controlling my temper as best I could, I informed them that I certainly couldn't put money down on our vacation without knowing a few basic things about it. The clerk said, "Oh, OK, we'll see you Tuesday then," as if it was a perfectly normal process.

The thing is, it IS perfectly normal! That's what travel agents DO! It gradually sunk in to me. I'm sure travel agencies take money all the time to arrange vacation packages sites unseen to the so-called travellers. Book us something in the Caribbean, darling, wake us up when we're there. MY notion of travelling, on the other hand, nurtured on Eurail-Pass footloose sponteneity, is that you choose when and where you go, yourself. I figured that travel agents just collaborate with you on finding deals.

So I adjusted. In my immediate fury I spent a day online and at bookstores researching everything about the islands that I could find, as if we WERE arranging the trip ourselves -- but when we went back to Little Atlantis on Tuesday we wound up going with the hotels they had chosen in the first place. They actually had put together a good package. They did what we hired them to do. In the end we wound up quite happy with their choices, and we parted with mutal enthusiasm about the arrangements.

Still, it was good to actually DISCUSS said choices with them, and to know a little bit in advance about where we're going.

--Matt