• By: Ruthanne Terrero From: Travel Agent Central
1. You’d never been to Spain before, so you asked around for travel advice. Your college roommate’s brother, who had spent a semester in Spain a few years ago, enthusiastically gave you a list of all the places he’d stayed at. It wasn’t until after you’d arrived in Madrid that you realized you’d booked yourself into the top youth hostel in town.
2. You’d heard cruising is an all-inclusive experience and it was pretty exciting when you went on that cruise discount website and saw those great photos of passengers sipping cocktails and touring the great sights of Europe. So it was sort of embarrassing when you got on board and realized none of those things were part of the “all-inclusive experience.” 3. You wanted to get away for the weekend so you “tweeted” a question to the masses asking if anyone knew of a great B&B in the New York area. JoeTravels, who seemed like a nice guy, was the first to respond with a great offer for a cute looking place, which turned out to be his house. You ended up sleeping in his kids’ room all weekend and having Cheerios for breakfast. 4. You knew you shouldn’t have dawdled in the straw market during your shore excursion but you thought your cruise ship would never take off without you. But it did! I’ll bet that website you used to book your cruise can’t wait for you to call them to tell the news and help you get off that island. 5. A room overlooking Rome sounded just swell in the online hotel description and it only cost 150 euro a night. Such a deal! Turns out it did overlook Rome but it was 10 miles out of town and cab service to the city center was 75 euro each way. 6. You weren’t really sure what a repositioning cruise was, but it sure did cost less than the other itineraries you read about. Who knew it would make only two stops during a 10-day trip? 7. You asked your friends on Facebook where you should go for your honeymoon, and a guy you went to high school with (whom you only sort of remember) told you he ran a travel company and that he’d get you a discount. It was only after he’d taken your money and disappeared that you remembered that he’d also disappeared suddenly during senior year, to serve time for stealing all the hubcaps of the school’s buses. 8.You booked that gorgeous hotel on the California coastline and you couldn’t believe how beautiful the views of the Pacific looked in the online photos. So you were a little disappointed to find on arrival that to actually get to the beach you had to walk half a mile and cross over a highway. 9. Your neighbor just came back from an expensive ranch vacation out west and has been bragging about it endlessly. You got so jealous you went ahead and booked yourself on the same trip. But when you got there you realized just how much you hate the great outdoors and how horses kind of scare you. And those mosquitoes! 10. You and your fragile, aged, wealthy aunt both love animals, so you thought a cougar cruise sounded fun. After seven days of constantly being mistaken for women on the prowl, your aunt has written you out of her will and you figure you’ll only need seven years of therapy to recover from the entire experience.

Top 10 Reasons to Use a Travel Agent

    • By: Ruthanne Terrero
    • From: TravelAgentCentral

1. You’ve Googled “Mexico vacation,” and come up with 17.8 million responses. Need a little help editing those choices?

2. Remember when you used that obscure website to book your hotel, and when you got there you spent your beach vacation overlooking a parking lot? 3. How many hours were you on hold with the airline when your flight was canceled because of a snowstorm? 4. Did you really mean to spend your honeymoon at that resort whose one tiny pool was filled all day with 12 screaming children? 5. Who knew that when you booked that “villa” in Tuscany, it would be a small room with a kitchenette and no air conditioning? Funny, it looked much better on your computer screen. 6. No one explained to you that in July, it’s winter time in Rio, and so you showed up there with nothing but five Hawaiian shirts and three pairs of swimming trunks. 7. How about the time you really needed a restful vacation, and you ended up in New Orleans during Mardi Gras and someone threw up on your shoes? 8. Yes, I guess that hotel must have used a telephoto lens when they took a picture of those guest rooms that you saw on their website. 9. I suppose contacting the Attorney General to resolve the fact that that Internet site has billed your credit card three times instead of once is the only route to take at this point. 10. It was definitely odd that there were no cab drivers at the airport at 3 o’clock in the morning when you finally landed in Costa Rica, but booking a transfer to your very remote hotel would have been a good thing to remember when you purchased your airline ticket and hotel online.