People making their lives more difficult by not using agents for flights in Vietnam

The other day I was at a cafe that is popular with the local crowd and someone new came in and sat with us. She was there for a few hours but for maybe the first 90 minutes she spent the entire time on her phone attempting to book a flight to Saigon. She kept asking us questions about why isn't it working and since she can only type so fast with her thumbs the prices would change and force her to start over.

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At the very beginning of this process I said to her when she was asking about flights to Saigon that I thought she should "walk a block away to the agent that I use and just have him book it." The guy only charges $10 for the service and if you want he can and will even do it for you when you are not even in the room. You just tell him where you are going, what time you want to go, hell, if you want to be super picky you can even screengrab a shot of EXACTLY what flights you want and tell him to get it done.

I ran into this service a few months ago after getting frustrated with various nuances that exist with booking flights around Vietnam. I have lived in a few countries but I have never experienced the level of timeouts, resets because you were taking too long entering your information, or the fact that the site wasn't actually connected to the airline in question. For example: One day I was using kiwi.com to book a flight and I had used this site for years because it gives free travel insurance as an incentive to use their site. After trying half a dozen times to book an Air Asia flight I contacted Air Asia to find out what the issue was and they told me that they don't actually deal with kiwi.com and don't know why they even put their prices on their website.

I don't know if that is still the case but that was the case at the time. I got frustrated that day and just went to a local agent. I was already a bit pissed off and didn't want to muck about so I asked him straight up "how much commission are you going to charge because I'm not paying an extra million just to have you fill out a form for me" which is retrospect was kind of mean (a million is around $40 btw) but it was effective. He told me that he charges $10 regardless of where the flight is going provided it is in Asean territory. If it is properly international, like Europe or North America and beyond, he charges $20.

To me this seems extremely fair and I was delighted to have him do the legwork for me and have done so to this day.

now back to the girl that was at the cafe and was messing about with her phone for an hour or more: Eventually she did get a confirmation of sorts but now she had to go to a minimart chain in order to pay the flight balance in the next 2 hours or the ticket would be released. That part of the process took her an additional 20 minutes because she doesn't speak Vietnamese and the average minimart worker in Vietnam doesn't really speak English.

So all in she spent at least an hour and 20 minutes getting this flight booked and the agent could have done it in 5-10 minutes because they do it all day long. You need to ask yourself at this point the question of "what do you consider your time to be worth?"

For me, I don't necessarily always make $10 an hour but if that hour comes with frustration and stress about me potentially missing a flight I will GLADLY pay someone else $10 to do the process for me. I just don't understand people and their insistence on doing everything themselves all the time when there is a service just a block away that will do it for you for a nominal fee.

For me it just makes sense! I have said in the past that I always use an agent for booking my visas and that is why I never have problems. Now I feel that way about flights as well.

There was a time when doing the flight yourself was financially beneficial and cheaper than using an agent. These days I think the online booking business has become so over-saturated that using an agent is actually the better choice but people are so addicted to getting their phones involved with everything that they do that they are not saving money and they are also wasting a lot of time.