I asked one of the agents at Adler Travel to help me book a trip to Madrid and Paris so that my daughter, an art student, could see the great museums. The agent did competently book flights and hotels, and I'm choosing to see that as a "glass half-full". But she needed a couple of reminders and she took a couple weeks longer than she said she would. And really, in a world where we all have TripAdvisor, I'm not sure that saved me more than 4 or 5 hours versus doing it on my own.
Where I really could have used help, there was none. I was very clear about the purpose of the trip and the museums we intended to visit. Those museums are currently deluged with tourists and all now require booking time slots weeks in advance. If we had shown up without pre-booked tickets, we would have been turned away, negating the entire purpose of the trip and wasting thousands of dollars.
This kind of information - learned from personal trips to the destination or previous bookings - is the real added value a travel agent should provide. Our agent provided none.
Luckily for us, I learned about the need for pre-booking from Rick Steves' books before it was too late to get in. It was too late to get the time-slots we wanted, however. Some of the slots were decidedly inconvenient. A few weeks' earlier start would have been extremely helpful - a heads-up from the agent would have made a huge difference.
Our agent was simply MIA after the initial bookings. She did finally respond to an email requesting help booking flights from Madrid to Paris - after I'd already booked them myself - with apologies about missing my email in her very full inbox. I had to do all of the research and booking for the museums myself, something that took many hours.
Every agency has multiple agents with different levels of experience and enthusiasm for the job. Adler has a good enough local reputation that I'm sure some of the other agents are more helpful. But my experience with my agent was not great. I credit Rick Steves for a successful trip, not my agent. If I hadn't checked those books, it would have been a complete fiasco. read more