Sorry to be so late in answering but I've been without computer access for the past 4 days.

RTW just means "Round the World" and a RL travel agent is a "real life or live" travel agent. My RTW ticket was a custom-made one put together by a local travel agent (RL), before they started charging for the service. It's the kind of ticket you get through Star Alliance or One World (I think that's the other RTW specialist, not sure) but was cheaper than getting Star Alliance or the other one to customise a ticket. Not cheap,though, because of the odd route I insisted on taking. But completely flexible, all flights could be changed within the trip for no extra fee. The return home portion required a fee, but for some reason that got waived when I booked the return date at the end of the trip.

As far as using a regular travel agent, I do because they get better deals than those you find on-line. I use discounters, like Flight Centre, Travel Cuts, Discount Warehouse, etc., and one South Pacific specialist who deals in discounted tickets (but need to pay him cash because I don't want to wait months for the discounts to come through). I rather resent the admin. fees charged by most TAs now, but an extra $40 or so beats the huge difference in prices of discounters vs internet bookings (sometimes more than US$1,000 per ticket, which is ridiculous).

Think I've said this before, but the only cheap tickets I've ever found on-line are with Ryanair and Easy Jet, but that's dealing directly with them. Wish we had budget airlines like those two!

Nadine Vancouver