Woman's Day vs. The Travel Agent Community

Woman's Day vs. The Travel Agent Community

I took a few days to decide if I wanted to jump into the fray surrounding the controversial article that was written a few days ago by Woman's Day magazine titled, "10 9 Things Travel Agents Won't Tell You." Notice, I crossed out the 10 and changed it to 9, because throughout the past few days, the piece that was originally written (with outrageous misinformation) has been changed numerous times; therefore, I've lost track of what the original article even stated, but the non-edited version is still floating around somewhere on yahoo.com. I'm sure you can find it if you are so inclined.

Back in April I wrote a piece, "What's In It For Me When Working With A Travel Professional,", in that piece, I pointed out some benefits of working with a travel professional. I read the Woman's Day piece with much chagrin, because they pretty much trashed the travel agent community as a whole, but rest assured, the travel community took notice, and not just the agents, but numerous travel organizations like ASTA, as well as some of the heavy hitters in the supplier community like Apple Vacations. There were so many comments posted on the Woman's Day piece, as well as on their twitter account, that it was rumored that a lot of the comments had been deleted. Curious. Now that has me scratching my head.

Of course, I may be biased since I am a travel professional, and I take my work very seriously; especially when clients are forking out a few thousand dollars on a vacation, because it is my goal and soul desire to ensure they have the best experience they possibly can - with zero to few problems. While I can't guarantee there won't be issues during a clients travels; I can help to alleviate some of those issues, and essentially put those issues on my shoulders and make sure they are handled as expeditiously as possible, and hopefully in my clients favor.

There are unscrupulous and unprofessional people in every industry, but they are typically the exception, not the rule. Unfortunately, it is the negative or controversial items that seem to get legs and run away; versus the positive stories.  My final comment is that while the piece that Woman's Day wrote was clearly negatively slanted, it was refreshing to see so many organizations and clients of travel professionals, who bandied together to write comments and email the editor(s) of Woman's Day in support of the travel community...which, by the way isn't the dying breed that so many doomsayers have proclaimed it to be.

If  you'd like to stay abreast of this continuing saga, check out Stephanie Lee's site, Host Agency Reviews, which has links to most of the rebuttals to the controversial piece that was published by Woman's Day.

*Photo used from freedigitalphotos.net

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