Ellison Poe remembers the hours she spent on the phone. Back in 1991, when she was just one of 20 agents at Poe Travel, the agency her parents ran in Little Rock, Ark., she'd spend the better part of every day with the handset jammed against her ear, returning client calls and reserving airline tickets, rental cars, hotels and vacation packages. During Muzak interludes, she'd write out tickets by hand, and a staffer would deliver them at the end of the day. To book a hotel room in Florence or a rental car in Stockholm, Ellison would type her request into a telex machine, then wait - usually days - for a confirmation.

Now president of the family business, Poe has upgraded her technology, but she's still tethered to it all day. She starts each morning by checking her e-mail - from the Carlton InterContinental in Cannes, France, confirming a reservation for four at its Beach Restaurant; from the Casa Schuck in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, acknowledging a reservation for a garden tour; and from a random Web surfer who chanced upon Poetravel.com and wants to visit a dude ranch with a golf course nearby for her 50th birthday.

The rest of the day Poe, like her 34 staffers, is on the Web, checking Irish B&Bs; booking air tickets, hotels, cars and vacation packages via Sabre (the online reservations system); and notifying clients when their e-tickets are ready. Of course, she still spends some time on the phone - to stay in touch with important clients and head off the occasional catastrophe. "I have this VIP who wants to go on his honeymoon in May to Italy," sighs Poe. "May in Italy is impossible, so I called [him]."

Poe is awfully busy for someone who should have been drummed out of business. Pundits have been predicting the demise of the travel agency for years. "Travelers take flight to the Net," announced CNET in 1997. "Travel agents scramble as customers go online," declared the Associated Press two years later. "Travel agents losing sales to Web," reported the Los Angeles Times just last year.

"No question about it, there was nothing but doom and gloom," recalls Richard Copeland, president of the American Society of Travel Agents, recalling the days when the Net first emerged as a threat to the travel industry's status quo.

To be sure, the travel business has changed dramatically over the past six years. An estimated 10 percent to 20 percent of U.S. travel agents have gone out of business. The exodus began in 1995, when airlines began cutting agents' ticket commissions. Over the next three years, fees dropped from 10 percent for every ticket booked to 5 percent. The kicker: That 5 percent was capped at $50 a ticket, even if an agent booked a $22,000 Paris-to-New York flight on the Concorde.