1) Handwritten tickets

Calum Grant, who has owned Macraes Travel in Scotland since 1973, says he remembers sitting airline exams for Iata so he could work out mileages to calculate air fares. He also recalls how laborious the process of issuing airline tickets was. “I remember I did one round-the-world booking which had 18 tickets. If you got one digit wrong, you had to cancel the whole lot and start again. And we had to work out timings as well, remembering to take into account the International Date Line”.

Karen Bancroft, manager of Keir Woodward Travel, where she has worked for 30 years, says she also remembers when agents had to go to the station to collect rail tickets as a service for clients. “Now we have a special ATB printer which produces them – we can print out rail tickets with just a few strokes of the computer.”

2) The industry’s “human side”

Seventy-two-year-old Travel Counsellor Barbara O’Neil says she misses the human side of the large companies that she deals with, especially the airlines. “If you wanted something special or did something wrong with a spelling on an air ticket, you could phone them and they would see what they could do, because you knew them – they were usually airline reps who would pop into your office that you’d see on a regular basis,” she says.

Nowadays, O’Neil finds it difficult to receive that same friendly response. “You’re passed through to the sales or reservations teams, and while the smaller ones such as Ryanair and easyJet will usually try to help you, you very rarely get any help from the big airlines. They stick to their rules and there’s no sympathy.”

Alan Hubbard, 80, owner of Betta Travel in Lowestoft adds: “Years and years ago you saw reps on a regular rotation. Nowadays call centres just don’t seem to have the time to talk to you.”

3) Booking holidays further afield than the Costa Brava

“The world has become a much smaller place,” Karen Bancroft says. “It’s so much easier to get to places, and people have the technology to find things out and research places themselves,” she adds.

Travel Counsellor Richard Briggs, who has been in the industry for nearly 50 years, says customers were much more focused on holidaying on the Costa Brava in Spain or joining coach trips to Italy in the 1970s and 1980s. “It was rare to sell tickets to Australia or the US because the prices were completely out of people’s ranges. And the Canaries was a place that rich people went to in the winter,” he says.

4) Fam trips further than Europe

There were certainly fam trips back in the day, but agents say there are far more of them today, and as holidaymakers demand increasingly more exotic destinations, so agents are needing to brush up on their product knowledge.

“Fam trips used to be to the Costa Brava where we would go and visit groups of hotels,” Briggs says. “They were also predominantly for tour operator staff rather than retail agents, but in the 1990s, they started increasing; there are many more fam trips about these days.”

5) Packages dictated by tour operators

“One of the biggest changes over the years has been the change in customers getting what they want, rather than having to accept fixed packages put together by tour operators,” Briggs says.

“In the past 10-15 years, we’ve gone from tour operators saying ‘you can take it or leave it’ to customers asking for all the different elements, which I can put together for them.”

Travellers also have more options for travelling to their destinations today.

Bancroft explains how travellers previously used to travel to Australia on “freight and cargo ships which we called banana boats. They would travel to Australia on them just for the experience. Nowadays they can do the same route on six-star cruise ships.”

6) Higher commissions

British Airways’ decision to start scrapping commission for travel agents in 2001 prompted a domino affect, with other airlines following the flag-carrier’s lead, and made the topic of commission a hotly debated subject.

It is still making headlines today, this time in relation to changes introduced by the cruise sector.

In the 1990s, it was common for agents to earn 9% for international airline ticket sales – which would be a distant dream for many travel agents today.

“BA’s decision was a turning point for the industry,” Bancroft says. “We didn’t like it, but we had to move with it. It changed the way we did business travel as well – we had to introduce fees for corporate clients; they didn’t like it at the time, but it’s the way that business travel has gone.”

7) Technology – from microfiche to mailshot

“When I started out as a travel agent in the late 1960s, we would use microfiche [a card made of transparent film which was placed under the lens of a reader machine to magnify it] which would show all the availability that companies had,” Briggs says. “A cross-channel ferry company first issued the machine, and then other tour operators jumped on the band wagon. They would arrive once a week.”

Meanwhile, Grant remembers exploring computers at a 1975 Abta convention in Miami: “It seemed like we would have needed a computer the size of our office to do what we wanted. They seemed awful cumbersome,” he says.

8) Paperwork and presentation

Hubbard believes that today’s agents have to deal with more paperwork than ever before. “Nowadays there is a tremendous amount of paperwork, which involves auditors and pushes the price up. There is more paperwork and more overheads for a lesser return,” he claims. Agents also now have to print out much more paperwork for clients, he says, including documentation and rules that the clients need. In the past, Hubbard says, “they would send it to you in a nice wallet. You very rarely get anything as much as a luggage label from people these days.”

9) Spending weeks on a single booking

With no email or internet, booking holidays, particularly those to far-flung destinations, could take days, where now they take minutes. O’Neil recalls making a booking to Sydney using telex [a network of teleprinters similar to a telephone, which would send text-based messages].

“We would send a telex to the Sydney office and ask them to book the return, and the answer would come back on the system and we would have to wait for the time differences.

“Waiting for a telex might take hours. Today you could do the booking in minutes,” she says. But it’s not always better today – as Hubbard points out: “At least back then you got a receipt of acknowledgement when you sent something through, now you have no idea if your email’s been received.”

10) More discounting

Agents suggest the high street agent wasn’t necessarily better off 30 years ago. Bancroft believes discounting in the trade is not as bad as it used to be, and that the advent of the internet may have helped the industry. “In the 1980s and 1990s there was a stage when agents had to discount holidays but travel agents seem to value themselves more nowadays,” she says. “People go to travel agents because they want to find the right holiday for the individual.”

What are the other biggest changes to the industry? Let us know by leaving a comment or emailing: feedback@flymy.co.uk