Yes, one can do everything by themselves. But sometimes it's worth letting a middleman who actually adds value do some of the work.
I find this with lots of services. The help they provide is superficial and basically covers the easiest or most mechanical part of the task. But the actual intellectual part, they want to leave up to you. I'd much rather get my hand held on the decision making part, then filling out the form or whatever that may be annoying but is not particularly hard, even if it's the first time.
Ironically, in my business, I find it challenging to get people to trust you to give advice, they would rather come with a pre-determined, usually wrong, plan, and try to get me to implement it and take responsibility for the outcome. Which is maybe why services end up being more superficial, because people would rather tell someone else what to do than defer to expertise
No. I'm probably not going to pay a professional to plan my trip to NYC unless it has some very specific niche focus that they're expert in. But less traveled areas? Sure, if there's an appropriate pro available.
Is this something travel agents actually have any sort of exclusive access to? I thought travel agents were just resellers for existing travel packages. So if some tourism bureau has gone to the effort of assembling a package deal for a bunch of b&B's or inns to do a walking tour, the travel agent can book it for you. Or you can go to the tourism bureau's website and book it yourself. The travel agent isn't doing the work, they're just connecting you with a different middleman.
Just like a chef doesn't have exclusive access to ingredients, but they know what to buy and how to put it together.
Because it sounds great, and a little too good to be true. In my (admittedly limited) experience with travel agents, that's not really what they do, nor is it something i'd trust them to do - the travel agents don't seem to have any specialized local knowledge, what they do have is a catalogue that their agency has provided them with and they can help you choose a package from the predefined ones in their catalogue. This sort of concierge travel agent is not something i'm familiar with.