Effective summer 2007, the Wisconsin Union Travel Center will take flight, not to greener pastures but to various niches around campus.
The center's closing will open valuable Memorial Union real estate and makes sense considering the travel industry's flight to web-based technologies.
In justifying the Union's decision to close the center, Assistant Director for Social Education Susan Dibbell said students now turn to online resources rather than consulting the Memorial Union office.
Though this may prove true, the top-down decision to close the doors leaves 12 students jobless and 30,000 paying customers—not including those who consult services without purchasing resources—scrambling between the various entities that will assume travel center responsibilities.
Dibbell assured that services would remain intact, albeit reapportioned university-wide. But the likelihood that students will take kindly to a campus-wide scavenger hunt just for, perhaps, a Thanksgiving ride home, is minimal.
More likely the students will consult STA Travel, whose demands to reduce rent precipitated the Travel Center's demise.
A better alternative to closing the Travel Center permanently would be to divert the center's funding to online services. This would preserve consulting services for study abroad and international travel and could develop the rideshare network.
Travel Center Director Melissa Kaltenbach said she felt students would lose community with the elimination of peer to peer advising. However, travel agencies in the ""real world"" today depend almost solely on individuals without online capabilities, so it makes sense for a brick and mortar travel agency targeting computer savvy students to close down.
The WUTC provides valuable service to students with independent information about study abroad programs and international travel, but any efforts to salvage the center should focus on making that same information available online.
