Travel agencies are having a moment amid Covid-19 (wsj.com)

Please don't pick the most irritating detail and then copy it into the thread to complain about it. This leads to significantly lower-quality discussion, especially when the detail is off topic. HN threads are sensitive to initial conditions, so this is particularly important when there aren't many comments yet.

One thing we're working on learning together is how to respond to the interesting parts of an article or situation and leave superficial provocations alone. Not easy, but important for curious conversation.

Please note this site guideline—the examples are different but the principle is the same: "Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(Works with any DNS; Looks like "Reader Mode" in Firefox)

    curl -HUser-Agent https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/travel-advisers-delta-covid-11630442498|(x=$(echo x|tr x '\34');tr -d '\34'|sed "s/</$x&/g;s/ *//"|tr '\12' '\40'|tr '\34' '\12'|sed -n '/og:title/{s/.*content=./<h1>/;s/\".\*/<\/h1>/p;};/./{/meta charset/p;/<amp/,/<.amp/d;/<div class=.wsj-ad/,/<.div>/d;/<title>/,/<\/title>/p;/<p>/,/<\/p>/p;}') > 1.htm

    firefox ./1.htm
    brave ./1.htm
    chromium ./1.htm    
    edge ./1.htm
    safari ./1.htm
    w3m ./1.htm
    lynx ./1.htm
    links ./1.htm <--- recommended :)

We are making society increasingly more difficult to navigate and creating more barriers that imped the movement of people. We are all hurt by these policies and I have not seen sufficient evidence that they do anything to curb the spread of covid now with high transmission rates all over the world. The time for travel restrictions for most of the world has long passed.

The idea that its just a massive waste of money among the tech space is hilarious when people will also make the most minute changes to their workflow to save fractions of a second, but not pay someone $50 to remove hours of headache from a fun event like a holiday.

And contrary to what you're saying, I've gotten some awesome travel deals during the pandemic. I had many months of AirBnBs for 20-30% less than the normal rate.

I find this with lots of services. The help they provide is superficial and basically covers the easiest or most mechanical part of the task. But the actual intellectual part, they want to leave up to you. I'd much rather get my hand held on the decision making part, then filling out the form or whatever that may be annoying but is not particularly hard, even if it's the first time.

Ironically, in my business, I find it challenging to get people to trust you to give advice, they would rather come with a pre-determined, usually wrong, plan, and try to get me to implement it and take responsibility for the outcome. Which is maybe why services end up being more superficial, because people would rather tell someone else what to do than defer to expertise

Is this something travel agents actually have any sort of exclusive access to? I thought travel agents were just resellers for existing travel packages. So if some tourism bureau has gone to the effort of assembling a package deal for a bunch of b&B's or inns to do a walking tour, the travel agent can book it for you. Or you can go to the tourism bureau's website and book it yourself. The travel agent isn't doing the work, they're just connecting you with a different middleman.

I’ve always been curious, how much % of your traffic is from the ozbargain posts compared to people coming to the site directly?

Also is there much to be made on affiliate commission on flights or is it just optimistically hoping for hotel/car reservations?