Travel Agencies

All around Mario Romero's strip-mall travel agency, this immigrant neighborhood was alive with commercial traffic, all of it moving to a clave rhythm clunking from an outdoor speaker. In and out they went on a sunny Monday morning to the IGA food store, or the Gala hair salon, or La Epoca restaurant for a cafecito. But few stopped in to see Romero. His business, Cojimar Express Services, is one of dozens of Miami-area agencies that hold federal licenses to sell plane tickets to Cuba.

Fourteen travel agency owners or employees were indicted on human smuggling and other charges, accused of selling airline tickets they thought would be used by illegal immigrants, officials said Thursday. The charges were connected only to the sale of tickets to undercover officers, but authorities said a records analysis showed that six travel agencies had sold tickets to an estimated 6,800 illegal immigrants since mid-2005.

At Universal Studios, they've printed stacks of theme park maps written in Chinese. Disneyland for the first time sent salespeople to a trade show in China to promote the park. And at the Shanghai Spring travel agency in Alhambra, owner Jan Huang has contracted for four new tour buses and hopes to double her staff of tour guides to 20. It's all in preparation for what they hope could be a boom in new Chinese tourism to the United States that is expected to occur next year.

Always wanted to brag to your friends about your trip to Brazil, but couldn't afford to go? No problem! For $500, nobody will believe you weren't sunning yourself last week on Copacabana Beach, just before you trekked through the Amazon rain forest and slept in a thatched hut. Hey! That's \o7you, \f7arms outstretched like Kate Winslet on the bow of the Titanic, on top of Corcovado! Persey Tours was barely keeping the bill collectors at bay before it started offering fake vacations last year.

Regarding Catharine Hamm's "If You Need a Pro" on finding a good travel agent ["On the Spot," April 12]. There are several good sources for finding reputable travel professionals: American Society of Travel Agents: www.travelsense.org/agents. All travel agents in this directory are ASTA members and adhere to a code of ethics. Virtuoso: www.virtuoso.com. Virtuoso is the world's most exclusive network of travel advisors, with only 1% of travel agencies invited to join. Signature Travel Network: www.signaturetravelnetwork.

TRAVEL agents have begun to call it "togethering." It is never a good sign when a commercial group takes a perfectly good adverb, adjective or noun and turns it into a verb. I fear "togethering" is no different. As far as I can gather, it is an attempt to brand the much-remarked-upon "trend in intergenerational family travel."

Remember when booking a vacation meant visiting a travel agency that overflowed with brochures of exotic places? Please. That's so 1990. Deserted by Internet-savvy shoppers and starved by the loss of airline commissions in the last decade, many bricks-and-mortar travel sellers have closed up shop. But more than 100,000 people in the U.S. still work as travel agents, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. A growing number have left the office and gone home -- often to cyberspace.

\o7Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practi\f7\o7c\f7\o7e to deceive!\f7 WHEN Sir Walter Scott wrote those words nearly two centuries ago, he could not have imagined how they could apply to something called the World Wide Web. The Web's complexity, global reach and de facto anonymity open the doors for anyone with imagination looking to make a buck. There are more than 63 million registered domain names, and about 1.

Travel agents may seem like anachronisms in this age of Internet booking. Sitting down with a human and shuffling through brochures to plan a trip may seem quaint. Not to mention expensive, because most agents now charge service fees. It doesn't make sense to spend $30 or more to book an airline ticket through an agent when you can do it free at an airline's website or for $5 or $10 through such big Internet travel merchants as www.expedia.com, www.orbitz.com and www.travelocity.com.

What should a traveler do when service with a smile turns into service with a scowl? Count to 10. Unfortunately, when things go wrong on a trip and travelers seek an explanation or apology from a hotel, airline or other travel service, they often get neither. It is rare for an organization to offer a refund or a credit toward a future purchase. To improve your chances of correcting a problem, here are a few general rules: * Complain immediately.