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With a click here and a credit card number there, the Internet makes travel simple -- unless something goes wrong.

Then whom do you call?

"They call us," Karen Van Westen, travel consultant with Southwest Tour and Travel in Jackson said. "But there's nothing we can do."

Travel agents can access travel arrangements they booked only, Van Westen said. Yet when arrangements made elsewhere go awry, people often turn to agents for help because neither the Internet nor the airlines offer personal service.

"I point this out with my Internet shoppers, but they just love their Internet," Van Westen said. "It's been hard on us. We keep taking hits. First it was the Internet, then it was the 9/11 (terror attacks) and then it was the economy and the commission cutting."

Airlines no longer pay travel agents a commission for booking flights. This has forced agents to charge clients for this service, which has prompted some travelers to book flights directly with airlines and has sent others to Internet travel sites and ticket consolidators.

As more agencies fold under the pressure, agents predict additional charges for their services in the future and less competitive service fees for booking travel on the Internet. One thing they suspect will not change though is their status as the only place travelers can count on customer service.

Internet mishaps

As more people turn to the Internet to book travel, stories of mishaps are mounting, Van Westen said. She recalled one couple purchasing timeshare space at a hotel in Mexico only to discover upon arrival that no room was available.

"The Internet does not do good customer service," Van Westen said. "The Internet is not a person, it's a computer."

Another customer had Van Westen price flights for his daughter and then booked the trip over the Internet because it was cheaper. One of the carriers went on strike the day the girl was returning home, stranding her midway. Even though Van Westen had not booked the flight, she called airport security to take care of the child and contacted her parents, who never heard a word from the web site.

Airlines also compete directly with travel agencies, undercutting agent's prices by $3 or $4, Van Westen said.

"And that matters to the client," she said. "Obviously we can't match that fare because if we lost $5 for every ticket it adds up at the end of the year."

A travel trade magazine recently reported that 60 agencies close every month nationwide, Stacy Mente, manager of Roundwind Travel Service in Luverne said. People who ask travel agents to research a trip and then book it themselves to save a few dollars are driving agencies to consider charging fees for research, she said. Some agencies in Omaha do this now.

"It's going to be more like a lawyer, or going to an accountant. You're going to pay us a fee to provide any type of service at all," Mente said.

Some travel packages and deals still are available only through travel agents, Mente said. She recently saved an avid Internet shopper $600 per ticket for an overseas trip.

"And it didn't just end there," Mente said. "If she has problems of any sort, she can call us, whereas, if you book over the Internet, who do you go back to?"

During a snowstorm in spring, some clients called Mente from Orlando after their airline stranded them for the night. She managed to get the family of six into Sioux Falls that evening. Had they booked the flight on the Internet or through the airline, they would have spent the night in Orlando, she said.

Internet not for all

Not everyone can or wants to use the Internet, Jeanette Otto, travel consultant at Cameron Travel in Marshall said.

"The elderly especially don't want to put their credit card numbers on the web; some of them don't even have credit cards because they believe in cash and paying for it right now," Otto said.

The agency now demands a deposit toward extended tours before doing research because younger travelers tend to use the information to book arrangements themselves, Otto said.

"Extended tours take a lot of work," Otto said. "We can't be putting in the hours for something that we know we're not going to get."

Most people can sit down at a computer and eventually get a fare they feel is fair, Ann Scheltens Gunter, owner of Monte Travel Service in Montevideo said. However, Web sites do not ordinarily show all possible flights and combinations.

"They're depending on people just getting tired of it and saying OK, OK, that must be a good enough fare," Scheltens Gunter said.

Travel agents have access to all flights, and they offer the security of help from someone local, Scheltens Gunter said.

"On 9/11, you could not reach the airlines, and the Web sites didn't advise you of anything," Scheltens Gunter said. "Even now when things are done on some of the web sites you are not advised at all of flight changes."

Some web sites also bury information about service fees, Susan Eitreim, owner of Star Travel Agency in Pipestone said. Her brother found this out the hard way.

"You have to be careful," Eitreim said.

Christina Williams, a travel consultant at Carlson Wagonlit Travel in Willmar is seeing some people return to travel agencies after being stung on the Internet.

"Unless the Internet site has a help line, and I don't think a lot of them do, you are kind of stuck," Williams said.

Williams heard recently that an airline experiencing a problem told travelers who booked tickets on the Internet that they needed to call their web site for help. All others got help at the airline desk.

"I thought, wow, how terrible," Williams said. "A lot of people who aren't familiar with the travel business think that they have something booked, it's a done deal, that there never will be schedule changes, or that anything will come up where they'll need to change -- but they do."

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