What's the story with sun holiday prices? A travel agent in Dublin city centre was offering weekend breaks in Barcelona for €319 last week. The deal covered flights and two nights accommodation in a three-star hotel in the city centre. Less than 10 minutes online and a virtually identical package is found for €292, not a huge saving but a saving nonetheless.
With airlines taking web-only bookings, hoteliers using their own homepages to sell directly to tourists and online travel services such as lastminute.com offering low-cost DIY packages, is the sun setting on the traditional travel agent after nearly 200 years of global dominance?
It seems that even their own are turning against them. The "days when people picked a holiday from a brochure and walked into a travel agent to book are over," a spokesman for the online arm of Thomson Holidays said recently. Its sister company in Ireland, Budget Travel, is singing from the same hymn sheet.
With 50,000 holidays already booked via its website this year, the company expects a third of its business will be done online this year, up from just 4 per cent two years ago.
Globally, the shift to online business has not been good news for travel agents. In the US their number has fallen from 24,000 in 1994 to about 17,000 today.
While Irish web users have embraced the new holiday channels - nearly two-thirds of those with online access have booked flights or made reservations online, according to a poll published last autumn by market research group AC Nielsen - travel agents have not been as negatively affected as their US counterparts.
Simon Nugent, CEO of the Irish Travel Agents Association (ITAA) is confident his 200 members will survive in an increasingly competitive market.
He says that business has been very good and expects travel agents to do in the region of €1 billion of bonded turnover this year.
"While it is true that the savvy traveller can book some holidays online cheaper, it is more complicated than that," he says.
People planning a DIY holiday to an unfamiliar destination can end up at the wrong airport and find themselves five hours from their accommodation, late at night when the trains and buses have stopped running and the car hire company has closed, he says. "It is very hard for people who are going somewhere new to know exactly what it the best way to get there," Nugent says. "Travel agents offer that service. People are travelling differently now and looking for a wider range of experiences and they need more advice. If you're investing in the key fortnight of the year, you need to be sure you're getting the right thing."
He says that while the DIY option can work out cheaper, there are also times when travel agents have access to prices that you won't get online. "Travel agents have all sorts of ways of helping you get more out of your holiday. You are buying a quality experience."
While travel agents do play this advisory role, so does the web. TripAdvisor is the second-biggest travel website, after hotel, flights and car booking service Expedia, and the biggest online travel information and advice destination.
A brilliantly simple concept, the site, which gets 20 million visitors a month, invites users to post their unvarnished impressions of the accommodation they have used. The site has more than four million travel reviews and opinions, allowing tourists to check out, sometimes in great detail, what to expect before they check in.
To see if online booking really does offer savings, PriceWatch went looking for the best deals on and offline last week. The results were mixed (see panel).
While big savings can be made by doing it yourself, it is not always the case. The go-it-alone option is not always cheaper, but it is always worth looking, depending, of course, on your circumstances.
"If we were going on holidays on our own we would book it independently," says one person booking a holiday via an agency and entirely unconvinced by the allure of the web. "But if you get off a plane in a strange country at 10 o'clock at night with two crying kids in tow, you really just want someone to point at a bus and say 'go over there, that'll take you to your hotel'. It takes all the hassle out of it."
