A day in the life of a travel agent
For Marsha Kraus, it all began with a hotel room, which she nicknamed The Hawaiian Cockroach.
Kraus, a travel agent for Morris Murdock Travel, bought a vacation to Hawaii a little over 14 years ago. The excursion was booked through a travel agency, and Kraus was not impressed with the result of the trip. A bad hotel room full of cockroaches ruined the vacation for Kraus and gave her bitter feelings toward the travel agency she previously had worked with, she said.
“After that trip, I decided that I was not going to do that again,” Kraus said. “I knew that I could do a better job than that travel agency.”
Kraus put her skills to the test and invested both her time and money into travel school, she said. Travel school is a three-month program that Kraus said taught her how to handwrite a ticket, work with exchanges, learn airport and city codes, know how to book a car, and learn how to schedule flights and deal with airlines.
“It is definitely a lot of hard work,” Kraus said. “You have a lot to learn because you have a lot of pressure and responsibility placed on you.”
Kraus said typical office hours for her begin at 9 in the morning and ideally will end near 6 that evening. Realistically, however, Kraus said her day does not seem to end till 7 or 8 p.m.
“I spend a lot of my day calling around asking for the fairest prices,” Kraus said. “I spend a lot of time calling clients back and working out problems.”
Kraus said January to April is the busiest time for travel agencies because of the heavy rush of people trying to book their summer vacations.
Kraus said summer is a slow season because a lot of individuals have already made their summer vacation plans. However, Kraus said things begin to pick up around late July and August.
A lot of Kraus’s customers are couples and families planning trips to Disneyland or a cruise. But Kraus said working in a college community lets her see a lot of college students coming in to plan their Spring Break excursions.
“It’s typical for us to see a lot of freshmen spring breakers,” Kraus said. “The freshmen want a fun Spring Break, but they don’t realize that they needed to book one back in November or December. A lot of college students do not seem to realize that things book up fast.”
Kraus said even honeymooners are not much smarter than the young college students when it comes to booking a vacation.
“Sometimes I will see honeymooners who want to travel the world for under $200,” Kraus said. “People like that make this job quite comical.”
Hawaii, Disneyland, Mexico and cruises are a few trips Kraus said she books more than others in the Logan area.
“Sometimes we even have people who will just call and tell us they have time off next month, so they ask us where they should go,” she said.
Kraus said with the new technologies evolving on the Internet, travel agencies have felt an impact. Although the Internet has made it easy for people to log on and buy a vacation, Kraus said people are starting to realize if they value their money, they will not use the Internet.
“There is a draw that is coming back to travel agencies,” Kraus said. “People are starting to realize that there is no recourse on the Internet. If something was to go wrong, there is no one to help them or nobody to talk to.”
But even with practical experience from travel school and 14 years of experience behind her, Kraus has made mistakes. Just recently, Kraus had an experience where she had booked a cruise line but instead of departing from Salt Lake City, the tickets read St. Louis.
“The codes just got mixed up,” Kraus said. “This job is not as much fun as you hear. They make it sound all glamorous, but it’s not. It is very stressful.”
Kraus said with all the pressure and stress on her, her next job choice would be a Wal-Mart greeter because of the laid-back atmosphere. But Kraus said even with all of the responsibility and worry thrown into the job, there are benefits.
“This is a fun job when you can send people to where they want to go,” Kraus said. “And especially when you see them excited to go.”
-courtnie.packer@aggiemail.usu.edu