Field notes · 28 March 2026

Why Your Travel Agent Still Exists

Twenty years after the internet was supposed to kill them, they are still here.

In 2005, the conventional wisdom was settled: travel agents were finished.

Expedia had launched and Booking.com was growing. You could sit at a computer, compare hotel prices across fifty properties in any city on earth, and book a flight in four minutes. The information asymmetry that travel agents had lived off for decades, knowing prices and availability that consumers did not, was gone. Disintermediation was inevitable.

Twenty years later, the global travel agency industry generates over $400 billion in annual revenue.

The middleman did not die. In many ways, it multiplied.

What People Got Wrong About Disintermediation

The 2005 thesis had one flaw: it assumed that the travel agent's only job was information arbitrage. Know the prices, pass them on, take a cut.

The actual job is trust and assembly under complexity.

Booking a flight from Delhi to London is a transaction. Booking an 18-night, five-city Europe holiday for a couple with specific hotel preferences, a tight transfer window in Venice, a Schengen visa that needs to be filed four weeks in advance, travel insurance that covers a pre-existing condition, and a customised anniversary dinner in Florence is not a transaction. That is a project.

Expedia did not kill the travel agent because Expedia cannot manage a project. It can facilitate a transaction. Those are different things.

The Stack Has Three Layers

"Travel agent" is actually three different jobs, often confused as one.

Layer 1: The retail agent

This is who most consumers picture: a person or, increasingly, a company that sits between the customer and the holiday. They understand what the customer wants, design an itinerary, source the components, and deliver the experience. They hold the customer relationship.

Most Indian travel companies, from the large ones like Thomas Cook and SOTC to the thousands of smaller operators running out of tier-2 cities, are retail agents. Their product is the assembled holiday. Their customer is you.

Layer 2: The DMC (Destination Management Company)

This is the layer most consumers have never heard of, and the one that does the most invisible work.

A DMC is a ground operator based in the destination country. They have local hotel contracts, local guides, local transport fleets, and local knowledge that no Indian operator sitting in Mumbai can replicate. When a retail agent sells you a Europe holiday, they often do not actually operate anything in Europe. They brief a DMC in Paris or Rome or Zurich, who then executes the itinerary on the ground.

The DMC's business model is wholesale: they sell to retail agents at a net rate, the retail agent marks up and sells to you, and the DMC never appears in your invoice. You may travel through five European cities and interact with DMC-sourced services for 18 days without ever knowing the DMC exists.

Layer 3: The B2B aggregator

This is the newest layer, and the one reshaping the industry most aggressively.

Aggregators like Hotelbeds, RezLive, and Tiqets have aggregated the DMC's inventory, hotel beds, activity slots, transfer vehicles, onto a single platform accessible to any registered trade buyer with a login.

A small Indian operator who does not have the volume to negotiate direct contracts with hotels in Venice can now access Venice hotel inventory at near-wholesale rates through a B2B aggregator. They do not need a DMC relationship. They do not need a local office. They need a credit line and a browser.

This is the layer that is genuinely disruptive, not to the retail agent, but to the DMC.

Why the DMC Isn't Dead Either

If a B2B aggregator can give a retail operator access to hotel inventory without a DMC, why does the DMC still exist?

Three reasons.

Relationships that cannot be aggregated. The best hotel rooms, the ones that are actually good rather than just well-reviewed, often are not on aggregator platforms at all. A high-end villa in Amalfi, a boutique property in a Swiss village, a family-run Florence hotel that does not list on wholesale platforms because they do not need to: these exist only in the DMC's rolodex. The aggregator has breadth. The DMC has depth.

Operations that cannot be digitised. When a customer's transfer does not show up at Rome Fiumicino at 11pm because the driver had an accident, someone needs to pick up the phone, find a replacement vehicle, and keep the customer calm. The aggregator's platform cannot do this. The DMC's local operations team can.

Complexity at scale. For large group movements, 20 people on a coach itinerary, a corporate incentive trip, a wedding group, the operational complexity is genuinely beyond what a retail agent sourcing piecemeal through aggregators can manage. The DMC takes the full brief and delivers a turnkey operation. That is worth paying for.

So the DMC has retreated from the commoditised middle, standard hotel rooms in major cities, common experiences in popular destinations, and held its ground in the premium and complex segments. A rational response to disruption.

What the Retail Agent Is Actually Selling

The retail agent's job has evolved significantly in the last decade. The pure information-arbitrage model is gone. What the good ones have built their businesses on falls into three areas.

Curation. Not every hotel in Paris is appropriate for every traveller. Not every gondola operator in Venice is legitimate. The retail agent who has actually sent clients to these places, collected feedback, vetted quality, and built a product is selling something the internet cannot replicate. The internet gives you options. The agent gives you a shortlist.

Coordination. A multi-city Europe holiday has dozens of moving parts. Flights, hotels, transfers, activities, visa, insurance: each sourced from different suppliers, each with its own confirmation timeline, each potentially failing independently. The agent holds all of it together. When something goes wrong, there is one number to call.

Accountability. When you book direct, through Booking.com, through Airbnb, through GetYourGuide, you own every failure. When a hotel loses your reservation or an experience cancels last minute, you are your own customer service. The retail agent absorbs this. They are the point of accountability.

None of this is available on Expedia, which is why Expedia did not kill the travel agent.

The New Threat: The Platform Operator

The actual threat to the retail travel agent in 2025 is a new class of company that combines the brand of a retail agent with the infrastructure of an aggregator, cutting the human layer thin.

Companies building AI-powered itinerary tools, direct API integrations with hotel and activity inventory, and self-service booking flows are not trying to compete with Expedia. They are trying to do what the traditional travel agent does, at software margins.

The economics are compelling. A traditional retail agent with 10 operations staff can manage maybe 200 bookings a month at 15-20% margin. A platform operator with the same infrastructure, mostly automated, might manage 2,000 bookings at 10-12% margin and still generate more absolute profit.

This is the model genuinely threatening the traditional travel agent. The OTA goes after a different customer entirely. The platform operator goes after exactly the same customer with a structurally lower cost base.

Why the Agent Survives

Complexity is sticky.

The commodity holiday, two nights in Goa, a direct flight, a beach resort, has been fully disintermediated. You book it yourself. The travel agent is not involved.

The complicated holiday, multi-city Europe, Japan with a rural ryokan segment, a Maldives overwater villa with a specific reef, is still predominantly sold through agents. The coordination, curation, and accountability those trips require is real, and consumers are willing to pay for it.

The travel agent exists because travel is one of the few categories where the purchase is irreversible, expensive, and emotionally loaded, and where getting it wrong has consequences that cannot be undone with a refund.

You can return a bad pair of shoes. You cannot undo a bad honeymoon.

That asymmetry is what keeps the intermediary alive: a genuine consumer need that the internet has not yet figured out how to meet.

Where This Goes

The intermediary layer is being stratified rather than eliminated.

Pure transactions, flights, hotels, simple packages, have moved to platforms. Margins are thin and volume is high. At the other end, bespoke travel for high-net-worth clients remains DMC-heavy, relationship-driven, and largely untouched by aggregation.

The fastest-growing and most economically interesting segment sits between those two: complex itineraries assembled by tech-enabled operators who use aggregator infrastructure but maintain a human curation and support layer. That is where the old model is being rebuilt with new infrastructure, and where the economics are most in flux.