Mitch Lipka Reuters
(Reuters) - Justin Yax has booked plenty of trips himself using myriad online travel sites. But for a tour of Italy in 2009 and his honeymoon trip to the South Pacific next month, he went old-school and turned to a travel agent.
"There's greater comfort when talking to somebody - a real person," says Yax, a partner in a Bend, Oregon advertising agency. "It's not just putting something in a shopping cart and checking out."
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Yax, 40, is not alone as travel agencies enjoy a turnaround.
Agencies had been suffering from years of declines as online travel sites - including Expedia Inc, Travelocity and Priceline.com Inc - took root.
Also, consolidation decreased the number of visible storefront offices, and many of the remaining agents switched to a lower-overhead work-from-home model, says Nina Meyer, president of the American Society of Travel Agents.
"The industry sat back for a while and said: 'Woe is me,'" she says.
Over the past couple of years, though, the pendulum swung back, and business is growing again - for many in leaps and bounds, she says.
Agencies made $95 billion in sales in 2011 - about one-third of the U.S. travel market, according to Connecticut-based travel research company PhoCusWright. While the majority of the revenue comes from business travel, the leisure segment still accounts from more than $20 billion.
At American Express Travel, Vice President David Patron says bookings through agents were up 12 percent in the first half of 2012 from a year earlier. The company is neck-and-neck with Expedia as the U.S. market leader, according to the Travel Weekly Power List.
Surprisingly, Generation Y - consumers in their late 20s - accounts for the biggest percentage of business at traditional agencies, according to Mandala Research LLC.
Some of that, Meyer says, is due to an increase in the number of young people who have gotten into the business as agents and are drawing clients from their own generation.