ma

Hello.

I am in the midst of planning a trip to Australia and am searching for a very reasonable and good travel agent in the New York City area. Anybody have any suggestions? All ideas are appreciated.

Cheers,
MA

DeeDee

Contact Pisa Brothers travel (they are in Rockefeller Center) or Valerie Wilson Travel. Two of the best agencies in New York City.

mike

Why do you need a travel agent to plan a trip to Australia?
I've planned a number of trips to Oz, NZ, Asia without paying anyone and have never run into any problems.
Make sure you're getting some kind of value added from a TA if you use one.

ma

Mike,

Do you have any suggestions of good websites to use to travel to Oz? I just thought I'd check out the travel agents to see if they have anything better to offer. Also, from your experience what is a good rate to Sydney in October? Let me know if you have any suggestions.

Cheers,

ma

Hillary

Mike, these two agencies have hundreds of travel agents between them. When you use an agency like these, the travel agents specialize in different parts of the world and don't book other locations. For example a cruise specialist isn't going to book you a trip to the Orient. With that type of knowledge and expertise about a place, they can get special perks (free upgrades), have tremendous first hand knowledge, blah blah blah. No, I am not a travel agent.

kris

I used Austravel out of Chicago (also have offices in NY) many years ago when we went and a friend used them a couple of years ago and we both liked their services. There's a lot more info on the internet now than when we went but we did a lot of traveling through the country on our 3 1/2 week trip and it was nice to have someone take care of the details and coordinate our schedule. Our airline went on strike the day we left and they took care of rearranging the flight and I imagine we could have used them to help us had anything else gone wrong. I normally do all of the planning for our trips now but if I were to take that length of trip again with that many flights and hotels I would consider using them again.

You might start with the Australian tourist board if you're going to plan on your own. I got a lot of brochures which gave me a really good idea of what we wanted to see, even some sample itineraries that we shaped into our own.

May

Where in Oz are you heading for Ma? I'm from the west-Perth. I have been to the eastern states and will gladly offer assistance. Save some money. Do it yourself. Australia is one of the safest and easiest places to get around in.
From:True-blue Aussie