The Travel Agent’s Call
I received a phone call recently from a travel agent in Canada. He had a longtime client interested in booking a crewed yacht charter, he’d found CharterWave on the Web, and he had a few questions to run past me.
First, he wanted me to know, he’d done his homework and found a boat for his client. It was one whose brochure photos he had seen on several websites, and thus he felt the yacht was in great condition. He also had found a broker to work with, someone in Britain whom he’d never met, but who had been nice on the phone and had a professional website. He wanted me to confirm for him that the yacht and broker he’d found were both, in fact, on the up-and-up.
What a potential nightmare waiting to happen for this poor man’s client.
I share this story not to embarrass this man, who really was trying to help his client, but because it’s not the first time I’ve heard such comments from a travel agent. Most of the travel agents I’ve talked with about yacht charter really do think it’s all right to find boats for their clients on the Web. Some make the extra effort, as this travel agent did, to work with a broker to verify that what they’ve found is actually a good boat–but not one travel agent in my personal experience has understood how to tell a reputable charter broker from a potential huckster with a snappy website.
In this case, it turned out the broker this travel agent was working with was not a member of any key professional organizations, had never been aboard the yacht in question, and knew nothing about the crew. The travel agent learned all this after I suggested a few questions for him to ask, to help suss out whether the broker was reputable. The travel agent later contacted one of the brokers on our CharterWave reputable brokers list, and got firsthand information about the boat he’d seen online, including up-to-date information about the crew and the yacht’s level of maintenance (the broker featured here on CharterWave had been onboard for a firsthand evaluation not long ago). The travel agent then thanked me and said he wished he’d found CharterWave in the first place. He felt quite relieved.
All of which is good for this man’s client, but which forces me to state the obvious for you, the vacation-seeker: Why, if you want to book a yacht charter vacation, would you use a travel agent instead of a reputable broker? Why put an uninformed middleman between yourself and the person who knows about the type of vacation you’re seeking? Why trust your vacation to somebody whose understanding of your yacht and its crew is based on no better information than you could find yourself with a Google search?
Even hard-working, honorable travel agents like this Canadian man know that yacht charter is a specialty vacation requiring the kind of knowledge that only a reputable broker can provide. That’s why good travel agents work with brokers. And, in my opinion, it’s why you should, too.