ArcaMax

Connections are everything, especially when you are traveling.

That's whether you want to meet locals, get a better room at your hotel, a deal on your cruise or when you're dealing with canceled flights and pre-paid hotels.

"You can't VIP yourself," jokes Jack Ezon, president of NYC's Ovation Travel, one of the city's largest. But it sure is nice to be treated like a VIP when you arrive or to have someone there to smooth over the rough spots. "We can negotiate a lot of exceptions on behalf of our clients," Ezon said.

Suzanne Johnson, a mom of three from Eastchester, N.Y., found that out when her family was unhappy with their noisy room at a fully-booked Hawaii hotel. "The staff wouldn't accommodate us," Johnson said, but their travel adviser "made our move happen."

That's why as millennial families head to exotic locales, seeking more adventurous and immersive experiences, travel agents -- now called travel advisers -- are seeing a significant uptick in business. Advisers in the Virtuoso network, which specializes in luxury travel, gathered recently in Las Vegas and reported that families in particular are looking for special experiences that they may not be able to arrange on their own -- whether it's an invite to a chess tournament abroad or a cooking lesson in a Palazzo, said Ezon, who spoke at the conference, which drew more than 5,000 advisers and suppliers from around the world.

"It's all about the human connection," said Keith Waldon, who founded the Departure Lounge, a new-style agency based in Austin, Texas, complete with wine bar and specialty coffees.

According to the 2016 MMGY Global's Portrait of American Travelers, travel agent usage hit a six-year high this year with one-third of millennial travelers being active travel agent users -- up significantly from just five years ago.

At the TMS Family Travel Summit I co-chair, Ed Tapan, head of industry Travel at Google, reported that nearly 30 percent of millennials have used a travel agent in the last year -- more than any other category of traveler.

"There is so much noise out there and so much information, Nancy was able to click through all of that," said Jason Reuben, who lives in Los Angeles, but called on Connecticut travel adviser Nancy Yale, Cruise and World Travel, to plan his honeymoon in Europe and Morocco. "It wasn't the extra perks as much as knowing we'd have a stress-free trip."

In some cases, travel advisers charge for their services; in others it is built into the cost of the trip. It is important to know that up front. These days, when anything from a grandparent's health to acts of terrorism to an outbreak of Zika can derail travel plans, "They want to know there is someone they can call who can take care of them," Nancy Yale said, even if they just want to change the itinerary.

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