Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Thursday the 29th of June and if you've been kind enough to listen all this week, you'll know that we're talking about issues which are relevant for the two peak holiday months of July and August. If you are lucky enough to be travelling then or even further into the

future. Today, we're talking about the difference in travel agents between high street

travel agents and online travel agents specifically. And I'm delighted to welcome back Charlotte

Hindle. Hello, Charlotte. Hi, Simon. So the reason why we're talking about this today

is because we get lots and lots of questions and queries and people actually in distress

when they have booked mostly, I've got to say, through online travel agents

because they've handed over lots of money and things have gone

wrong and they just can't get hold of these people. So that's a real issue. So, you know,

obviously you've got a choice when you're spending your money. Do you go down the high street

and go into the travel agent that's got premises there. Do you get a relationship

with someone who's selling you the holiday because they're sitting across the desk from you?

Or do you just, do you ring them up and get a relationship going that way? Or do you go to a website

which looks absolutely gorgeous, really, really enticing, and you do all of your clicking, and then you hand over all of your money to a website, but you actually don't really know who these people are or what to do, who to contact if things go wrong. So I mean obviously

there's there's room in this world for both of these, the high street travel agent and the online

travel agent. When Simon though would you particularly book with an online travel agent?

Very simply, Charlotte, for price. And I carefully say price as opposed to value because there's many, many benefits of going

through a high street travel agent or indeed one of the long-haul specialists, maybe companies

such as trailfinders, because they are run by professionals.

They can give really good advice.

Furthermore, they will do all the important stuff like checking the validity of your

passport to make sure you're entitled to go and giving you any other warnings and telling

you about the visas you might need and so on. So why would anybody ever go through an online travel agent who you don't have such

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