Agreed but it sort of depends of the cut the agent takes. A mate of mine recently took over a B&B on the Isle of Wight and I met up for lunch with him this weekend. Most of his current booking come from booking.com who take 15-18% on each booking. He's currently looking at ways to increase...
The good thing about TC and why we used them was if you booked online you didn't have pay a deposit and you could pay monthly by DD. Certainly when we first started using TC the other big travel companies didn't offer this. Annoying as we've now got to wait for our money back from our holiday...