It is difficult to defend a business whose core product can now be bought while lying in bed.

A flight, hotel room or tour that once required a phone call, an office visit and somebody behind a desk can now be booked before you finish your morning scroll. The internet removed the mystery. Then online travel agencies made comparison easy. Now AI can produce a seven-day itinerary before an actual travel agent has replied, “Hello, how may we assist you?”

As someone who studied Tourism Management, I should probably feel sentimental about traditional travel agencies. I do not. If an agency’s only value is pressing the same booking buttons available to the customer, that business deserves to be nervous.

But I also think we are diagnosing the death incorrectly. Travel agencies are not becoming useless. The version of the agency built around access is dying. The version built around judgement, trust and rescue still has serious potential.

The internet did not kill expertise

The old travel agent possessed something scarce: access. They could see fares, contact suppliers, issue tickets and assemble a trip in ways an ordinary traveller could not easily do alone.

That scarcity has largely disappeared. Airlines, hotels and digital platforms now sell directly to travellers. If I already know where I am going, understand the fare conditions and only need a straightforward return ticket, paying another person to complete the transaction can feel unnecessary.

Here is the sentence traditional agencies need to accept: the internet did not kill the travel agency; it killed the agency that confused access with expertise.

Even the employment data tells a more awkward story than “agents are finished.” The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects travel-agent employment to grow by 2% from 2024 to 2034. That is slow, but it is growth, not extinction. Meanwhile, UN Tourism reported that international tourist arrivals rose by 4% in 2025.

People have not stopped travelling. They have stopped needing help with the easiest part.

Travel became easier to buy and harder to manage

This is the contradiction I find interesting. Booking has become simpler, but travel itself has not necessarily become simple.

A cheap fare may exclude baggage. A transit route may quietly require a visa. A hotel may look close to everything on a map but be painfully inconvenient in real life. A cancelled flight can turn one booking into five separate problems involving an airline, accommodation, insurance, airport transport and a very irritated human being.

Search platforms are excellent at showing inventory. They are less impressive at understanding the whole person making the trip: the first-time flyer, the elderly parent, the student with a strict budget, the family travelling with children or the group whose plans collapse if one connection fails.

That gap is the opportunity. The future travel agency should not compete with a booking website at being a booking website. It should do what the website does poorly: reduce uncertainty across the entire journey.

In Ghana, trust can be more valuable than convenience

In Ghana, the travel decision is often more complicated than choosing a destination and entering card details. A traveller may be thinking about visa documentation, transit requirements, payment options, the legitimacy of an offer, the reliability of a tour operator and what happens if something goes wrong outside business hours.

That is why so much travel business still begins in WhatsApp chats, referrals and recommendations from someone trusted. This behaviour can look technologically backward, but it reveals something important: people are not merely purchasing movement. They are purchasing confidence.

The opportunity is not to preserve the dusty office with destination posters fading on the wall. It is to build a credible, digital-first service around that need for confidence.

There is already formal infrastructure for professionalisation. IATA maintains specific accreditation requirements for travel agents operating in Ghana. Accreditation alone cannot manufacture competence or honesty, but visible credentials, transparent fees and clear customer protections can help distinguish a serious adviser from a random social-media account promising “visa assistance” and vibes.

The potential is hiding inside difficult travel

The simple trip will continue moving online. That is fine. Agencies should stop fighting for transactions in which they add almost no value.

The stronger opportunity is in travel that is expensive, unfamiliar, coordinated or emotionally important.

Complex and visa-sensitive journeys

Multi-country itineraries, difficult connections and document-heavy trips create genuine planning work. A responsible agency can explain requirements, check the logic of an itinerary and help a traveller avoid costly mistakes. It must never pretend it can guarantee a visa, but it can make the preparation less chaotic.

Groups and organisations

Schools, churches, companies, associations, wedding parties and tour groups do not just need tickets. They need coordination, rooming lists, transport, payment tracking, communication and contingency plans. That is operational work, not a task a group leader should be forced to manage through forty-seven WhatsApp messages and one heroic spreadsheet.

Experiences that require local knowledge

Ghana has room for agencies that understand heritage travel, community-based tourism, festivals, food, ecology and the stories behind places—not merely the transport between them. A diaspora traveller looking for a meaningful connection to Ghana needs something no generic itinerary generator can guarantee: trusted people on the ground who understand context.

The same applies to domestic tourism. An agency that can package a thoughtful weekend beyond the usual list of famous attractions, work with local businesses and remove the transport headache is selling more than a reservation. It is turning scattered tourism resources into an experience.

The agency of the future will look less like an agency

I think the strongest travel businesses will become hybrids: part adviser, part concierge, part tour curator and part emergency support desk.

They will use technology aggressively. A modern agency should let customers discover packages, submit trip details, pay, receive updates and store documents digitally. It should use automation for routine quotations, reminders and back-office work. IATA’s own work on modern airline retailing shows that airline distribution itself is moving towards more flexible, customer-centred systems. Agencies cannot build their future on yesterday’s processes.

But technology should make the human service faster, not make the human disappear. When a traveller is stranded at 1 a.m., “please consult our frequently asked questions” is not customer care. The agency earns its fee when the itinerary stops behaving.

The business model must also change. Depending only on commissions encourages the agency to sell whatever pays, whether or not it is the best fit. A more honest model can combine transparent planning fees, specialised packages, corporate retainers, group-management charges and optional support services. Customers will pay when they can see what problem the fee removes.

The real threat is not technology. It is mediocrity.

There is, of course, no automatic renaissance waiting for every travel agency. Many will fail because they are slow, opaque and indistinguishable. Some respond late, publish vague packages, hide fees and treat customer support as a favour. Adding an Instagram page to that model does not make it modern. It simply gives the old problem better lighting.

AI will also absorb more itinerary research and customer service. That is not a reason to ignore it. It is a reason for agencies to move towards work where accountability, relationships and local execution matter. An AI assistant can suggest a route. It cannot meet a stranded group at the border, renegotiate with a supplier or take responsibility for a badly designed package.

This is why I cannot fully agree that travel agencies are a dying industry. A particular job inside the industry is dying: the person who knows little more than the customer but charges to stand between the customer and the booking.

The better travel agency sells fewer tickets and more certainty. It specialises. It responds quickly. It tells the truth about what it cannot guarantee. It uses technology without becoming faceless. And when the trip becomes complicated—as trips eventually do—it proves why a human expert was worth keeping in the loop.

Travel agencies still have potential. They just have to stop trying to survive as offices where people buy tickets and start becoming businesses people trust with journeys.