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Travel sites match needs with expertise

July 29, 2008 |

Now that many travelers are savvy enough to book their own vacations on the Internet, innovative Web sites are offering customized services for complex plans and exotic vacations through the services of experts -- the travel agents.

Sites such as Tripology.com and Zicasso.com serve as matchmakers between travelers, primarily those with complex or exotic plans, and travel agents with the appropriate expertise. Conceivably, your local agent might fit the bill - assuming they still maintain a walk-in office - but it?s also possible that the real expert on your destination is on the other side of the planet.

?Everybody knows a travel agent,? says John Peters, president and CEO of Tripology, ?but not everybody knows who?s a specialist in their particular destination or how to find them.? And the more complicated the itinerary, the more important it becomes to find the agent who can put it all together: ?Even little twists can make a square-peg trip not fit in the round hole of a typical online booking.?

At Tripology, visitors create (free) online trip requests inputting information on everything from proposed destination(s) and services needed to approximate budget and preferred style of travel. Requests are then matched to agents with the most appropriate expertise, three of whom can purchase the lead and make contact. Launched in June 2007, the site now has a database of 7,500 travel specialists and has processed almost 40,000 requests.

Get the full story at MSNBC

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