Travel agents & planners in England and Ireland?

I suggest that you go on the England & also the Ireland Travel Forums here on RS. State the information about your party and the places you have pencilled in to visit. Also name the place ‘just west of Birmingham’ that you wish to visit for family history reasons. At the same time, keep monitoring this thread to see what turns up.

Our basic plan is to fly from O'Hare to Dublin, and spend the first week there; specifically, around the Maynooth area, with maybe a day trip or two to places like Hill of Tara. Then, we'd fly from Dublin to Birmingham for Week Two. Regarding Birmingham, we're especially interested in the area within the Dudley-Rowley Regis-Halesown-Cradley area. Again, with a possible day trip somewhere out a little farther.

We'd like to rent a house for the entire group instead of hotel rooms.

If it's hard to find travel agents who can plan things like this on the Europe-side, would U.S. travel agents be able to take this on? I've never used a travel agent and assumed we'd be planning the trip from the ground up. But a voting member of our group insisted we should explore the agent option first.

We worked with McKinlay-Kidd, based in Edinburgh, for our trip to Ireland last year. They primarily work in Scotland and Ireland. They have pre-set itineraries or you can work with them, as we did, to create a bespoke itinerary. We told them our interests and the types of hotels/b&bs we were looking for. They created an initial itinerary and we tweaked it (for example, we choose to spend 4 nights in Killarney as a base for day trips rather than the 2 nights they’d originally proposed). We also added excursions to their initial itinerary and substituted a B&B in Galway in lieu of the hotel they originally proposed. It was the best of both worlds as we could provide a lot of input but they did most of the heavy lifting. We found them really easy to work with and their fee is very reasonable. We’ll definitely work with them again in the future. Just google the name and you’ll find their website.

The "voting member" should be assigned the task of finding a travel agent. If that's your mom, she may need to learn that if she's not doing the planning, she can't tell the person who is doing the planning how to do it. Do travel agents even exist in the US anymore except to book cruises? You could also search for the thread on this forum about using AI to plan trips. You would need to verify all its suggestions, but it might provide you with a starting framework. If you're not planning to drive and want to use public transportation, you may want to figure out your transportation before you book lodging.

remember that if a travel agent isn't intimately familiar with an area they will be using the same internet as you could.

And they will only suggest properties on which they can make a commission - either from the owner or you. Higher price, more commission. So may not save you any money and may likely cost more.

I used to work the very good train line linking Kidderminster - Stourbridge Junction ( an ancestor used to work in Stourbridge on brass, not glass ) - Lye - Cradley Heath - Old Hill - Rowley Regis which are in that order, on the way to Birmingham Snow Hill via West Bromwich and the Jewelry Quarter. Fast frequent comfortable trains.

Dudley is the only outlier, it being on the Birmingham New Street to Wolverhampton Line.

The towns you list are all working class areas and not touristic. You may be able to find a house large enough for 8 or 9 in Kidderminster.

In all honesty with the advent of the internet and websites, Airbnb, Vrbo, et al, the concept of a travel agent is forgotten. I was born when Truman was in office and stopped using a travel agent well over 20 years ago.

I’m a loyal Virgin Atlantic customer. Easy peasy overnight flight from ( hell on earth ) LAX to Heathrow (LHR).

Also flown from LAX to Orlando. Stayed with friends for a few nights then was driven to Miami to board a chartered flight to Havana. This was in 2012.

I book my own accommodations and fly to London nearly every year. Favorite city on the planet.

Check Marriot, Residence Inns, Premier Inn and Travelodge websites for UK. Residence Inns, Radisson, Hilton and Travelodge for Eire.

Hi scare-boron,

The agent mentioned above (McKinlay-Kidd) sounds like a good resource. I've mentioned in other threads that I have some experience with Toronto-based DH Tours. They're UK & Ireland specialists who serve as a broker for certain tour operators but also do bespoke planning. This page is worth a read and you may want to contact them to see if they could arrange your type of trip (even though I know you're not looking for a tour) or offer recommendations. https://dhgrouptours.com/coach-tours-rail-tours/custom-travel/

Best of luck!

There are many travels agents in the U.S. who do more than just book cruises. It all boils down to just how much money you want to spend for their services. We used two in Naples, FL when we lived there. Mad Travel and Preferred Travel. The first one helped us with our travels in Ireland.

If you're feeling overwhelmed, maybe you should delegate responsibility among the good planners in the family. One for accommodation, one for rental cars (make this one of the drivers), one for flights, one for family history and one for general sightseeing. The days of using a travel agent for a small group trip like this are over. As someone else suggested, you could work with a tour company to do a custom tour, which I expect would cost twice as much or more. Former RS guide Sarah Murdoch's company offers custom tours. https://adventureswithsarah.net/ondemand-tours/

It's not my area, but there must be specialist private group tour companies in the Birmingham (England) area who can put that kind of thing together.
In my part of the world (the Lake District/South West Scotland) we have at least two- Dumfries Tours and Solway Tours who do exactly that. Certainly Dumfries Tours will give accommodation recommendations. They are anything but cheap, and of course only cover Scotland and the Border Region.
But there must be someone similar in the Midlands.