Please be careful using this inexperienced 'travel agent'.
We should have terminated the relationship when we ran into problems from the start. First of all, we had to ASK to get quotes on airfare, rental cars, travel insurance, sightseeing, and other travel-related expenses, & we asked multiple times, by phone, text & email, both myslef AND my friend, but she wouldn't do it until we would get tired of practically begging her to do what she was supposed to do & would just end up doing it ourselves. She kept 'offering' to get the quotes after we asked her for them but then she would never actually get any for us. She did finally send us travel insurance information but when asked to explain it in simple terms, she wouldn't, or should I say, she couldn't. How could she? She doesn't know anything about being a travel agent. She admitted herself she was just starting & needed the experience.
She claimed she wouldn't get paid for booking our airfare so she let us know, in not so many words, to do it ourselves. She said she wasn't going to get paid for booking a vacation home, so we had to look for it ourselves. We looked for inter-island flight oursleves. We looked for ferries ourselves. We looked for rental cars ourselves. We looked for excursions ourselves.
She was more than willing to do any research & book anything she would get paid on, like a resort, but barely anything else. It would take lots of asking & many days of back & forth emails to get her to do anything. She always had an excuse: she was sick, her baby was sick, she was out of town, she was on vacation, she had things to do, she went to church, it was too late in the day, the banks were closed, she had to attend a convention, she went on vacation a Second time, etc.
When my family ran into financial problems & sadly had to cancel the trip we had been looking forward to all year, she stalled returning the little bit of refund money we were entitled to, claiming we had been problematic from the start (like if any kind of behavior on our part whatsoever merits her to hold on to our money). Excuse us if we expected a person in the service industry to actually give us good service.
As a business owner myself, no matter what the client does or how they act, They are still the client and You are still the provider of services. If you make a mistake, you eat the cost. If they are frustrated & irrate & want their money back, you make the cancellation as smooth as possible for them. If there is money to be refunded, you send it overnight, at YOUR expense, NOT theirs (she expected us to pay for stop payment fees & paypal fees for re-issuing a check SHE didn't spell correctly).
Bad planning, bad business practices, bad bad bad. We ended up not going on vacation & losing thousands of dollars in the end. She wanted us to have some simpathy for her because she did not make a couple hundred off of us on this trip. Get some perspective, lady.
Please trust your instincts & immediately terminate your relationship with your 'travel agent' if you smell a rat. They say your first impression is usually correct. It was. We ignored it, for the sake of 'brotherly' friendship & we got burned.
To this day, we haven't gotten our money back...