When I fly a commercial flight, I do as everyone else and book the flight online. eTickets replaced fed-ex's from our travel agent; the lengthy calls to travel agents have been replaced by fare searches on Expedia.com. But how do travel agents survive if we don't need to call them?

Back PW (Pre-Web), travel agents earned their keep because they had access to information we didn’t have. The web changed all of that. The old axiom that information wants to be free was proven true again, and the PW travel agent was looking at the same information we could view. Airlines, always looking for ways to cut costs, saw that with a little investment on the web, we were intelligent enough to book our own ticket.

Fast forward to today. I am in the middle of planning some sight-seeing around my trip this month to the 4th EU-Latin America/Caribbean Summit in Vienna. I looked online at tourism sites, blogs from previous travelers, and reviews from online travel guides. Despite loving the web, all of this information got me reaching for a tall glass of the Johnny Blue. After the blue calmed my nerves, I reached out to a travel agent that specialized in eco-tourism in Europe. For a fee, she was able to organize every last detail of my trip, most of it based on her first hand experience or from experiences of previous travelers. She used her travel agent skills and her expertise in a specific niche to define her value.

Sure the Internet can cause a PW middle man some trouble. If you fear you are a PW middle-man or woman, fear not. Look at how you can use that broad expertise in the process and couple that with some specific value-added knowledge or creativity (something we will never be able to ship offshore btw) to create a new service that people need!