Rates go up by the second, even for human operators (agents). A good agent grabs seats for clients to lock in the price. This provides surety of cost.
Meta search engines for flights like Google, Skyscanner, Wego, etc... ‘store’ information from Agents so provide a ‘quick’ and sometimes dirty answer to the flight availability question. The customer see’s this as... rates go up while you are waiting online…
The solutions is to get the best of all worlds... use an agent who is smart and quick. Or use an independent OTA like Future.Travel where the results you see are a realtime result coming back from the booking system, rather than the stored ‘cache’ data from 1–2 hours or days ago as provided by the large corporate websites. The difference in realtime results versus cached results is what agents use to get you the best available seats for the best price. An OTA is just 1000 times faster and has ability to draw on inventory that quite possibly is not available to the average shop front/ private agency.
The comeback for the ‘traditional agency’ is when they go online and provide full service on a global basis... via the internet.
