I have to agree. While trying to book a trip to Jamaica, I visisted 4 different travel agents in Brisbane. They all offered me the same, out of date, accomodation brochure, that only had 6 options! After doing some home work (which did actually take up a fair bit of time, but also armed us with a lot of information), we booked at 2 seperate places, niether of which had been offered before, and at a considerable saving to what we had been offered (on an out of date price list).
As far as the flights were concerned, and keep in mind this was before I discovered this site, I went to travel.com.au, came up with an itinery I liked, printed it out, and asked the travel agents what they could do. 2 of them said they couldn't even book the same flights (or get within $500/ticket). 1 offered a $10 discount. The agent I ended up using beat the internet price by $100 dollars each ticket. But the ticket had to be paid for back in June for a flight next week. To add insult to injury, I have just loged onto aa.com, and I can get both of us on the same flights next week, at $100 cheaper again, and on better fare codes (now that I know what they are). And until I logged on here and realised our mistake, the travel agent had quite happily taken our QFF no's, and then booked us on fare codes that didn't earn any points!
As far as the flights were concerned, and keep in mind this was before I discovered this site, I went to travel.com.au, came up with an itinery I liked, printed it out, and asked the travel agents what they could do. 2 of them said they couldn't even book the same flights (or get within $500/ticket). 1 offered a $10 discount. The agent I ended up using beat the internet price by $100 dollars each ticket. But the ticket had to be paid for back in June for a flight next week. To add insult to injury, I have just loged onto aa.com, and I can get both of us on the same flights next week, at $100 cheaper again, and on better fare codes (now that I know what they are). And until I logged on here and realised our mistake, the travel agent had quite happily taken our QFF no's, and then booked us on fare codes that didn't earn any points!