How to choose a reliable travel agency?

Why book with travel agency?

Engaging a travel agency will save you from a lot of headache. The travel agency will provide professional services to you travel to easy your travel.

Advise on the best season of travel. There are many places with seasonal travel, some places affected with very bad weather (high sea wave, typhoon, flooding) on certain months. You might get price down on the flight and hotel but you will simply cannot see the best part of the city as may many places close and so on.

Customers like to ask TA can get cheap flight ticket price? Advise on the most best flight price flight option and arrival airport. Do you know that if you arrive on wrong airport will cost you more money to pay for the land transfer to your place and also possible to cause connecting flight delay. Let for example, if you book a flight from London to Malaysia landed in KLIA, but you somehow buy another connecting flight to Penang from Subang Airport within time frame 1-2 hours. Do you think possible to rush and catch the flight with bad traffic on the road? In London city, already with 6 airports. Travel agency do have their own flight booking system to scan through all airlines from one place to able to book based on different class. Different class meaning to say, there are features on the flexibility on the changes of details (name, date, baggage, code share). Therefore, with all the examples above, definitely worth while to go get ticket from travel agency.

Hotel booking with travel agency? Well, there are many OTA (Agoxx.com, Booxxxx.com, etc) out there provide very competitive rate, options, reviews, rewards points and etc. Many people doesn’t know how OTA work, still back to hotel channel managers. Most of the travel agency work directly with the hotels and discuss with special offer from the hotel either on the attractive pricing, value add services such as room upgrade, complimentary meals/ items, free nights for long stay. Therefore this is definitely you cannot get from any OTA. Furthermore, travel agency can do more than what you think to give you most flexibility and value add services.

How to choose a travel agency to avoid scam?

  1. Book with your local travel agency registered with Ministry of Tourism Malaysia (MOTAC). You can choose the lincese valid and type (Inbound/Outbound/Ticketing) online by checking from minisry website. http://www.motac.gov.my/semakan/tobtab
  2. All registered travel agency must be a private limited company with “Sdn Bhd” at the back of the company name and with MOTAC licence number (not company registration number).
  3. All travel agency name must have below words/ phrase such as travel, tour, vacation, holiday and etc. Those company with enterprise, trading. normally they are illegal tour operator.
  4. If you want to go for car rental, bus rental, mini van rental. It must come with permit from SPAD. You can find in front of the windscreen with SPAD sticker besides road tax one. The vehicles are normally in green and white color. This is safety matter, as you know those with permit, the vehicles need to be sent to Puspakom for checking every 6 months and driver with public transport driving license.
  5. Think about what they offer making sense, if you find something is very cheap in the market like 40% lower or more compared on market price. then you need to beware on this to ensure you check license, company reviews (from website, trip advisor, fb), words of mouth, etc.