Friendships with Travel Competitors That Last a Lifetime

After my stint in Toronto, I needed to head back to Orlando to close out the apartment lease I had taken for my three-month stint opening Sanford Airport. So, as you did in the travel industry back then, I managed to turn what should have been an administrative trip into a week of golf, combining the Disney tournament with the annual TWIGS tournament.

The only slight problem was that, just as I am today, I was an appalling golfer. I had never really bothered learning either the etiquette or, to be truthful, many of the rules. At the Disney tournament, this resulted in me being called onto the stage in front of about 200 people to receive the appropriately named “Dusty Bin” award after losing 18 golf balls in 18 holes. To be fair, even on the hole where the professional golfer hit the drive for you, he managed to put my ball into the water, so there was clearly an element of destiny involved.

However, the TWIGS tournament produced the much more important piece of destiny, because it was there that I first met one of my lifelong friends, Ian Brooks, or “Gobby,” as many of his friends know him.

I was sitting at the post-tournament dinner listening to this loud London-wide boy giving what I remember as an outrageously anti-American speech, which was particularly brave considering we were sitting in Florida surrounded by Americans. I then discovered he was the new General Manager for Sales at Virgin Atlantic, Richard Branson’s airline that was already a major force on the London to Orlando route.

I went over afterwards to introduce myself and was amazed to discover that Ian already knew who I was. Not only did he know I was Commercial Director of Airtours, but he was also a former Intasun sales boy, so we knew loads of the same people. The collapse of ILG had scattered a generation of us across the travel industry, although Ian had headed from Bromley to Crawley and Virgin, while I had ended up in Manchester with Airtours.

We immediately started comparing notes about Florida. I remember trying to persuade Ian that Virgin should follow Airtours and move its Orlando operation to Sanford. He simply laughed at me. Virgin was a scheduled airline and therefore used the main terminal at Orlando International, and there was absolutely no way, he explained, that his valuable American outbound passengers were going to drive all the way to Sanford to sit in an Upper-Class seat.

It was a valuable commercial lesson for me. We were both flying leisure customers across the Atlantic, but our aircraft economics were completely different. At Airtours, our charter model was built around filling virtually every seat, and we regularly operated at 99% load factors. Virgin needed its Upper-Class passengers because the massive yield from the front of the aircraft helped subsidise the economics of everybody sitting behind them.

We did subsequently spend plenty of time looking at areas where we could work together, including sharing ground handling, but nothing much ever came of it. Scheduled airline tour operating and the vertically integrated charter model run by companies like Airtours simply didn't fit together as neatly as we wanted.

The irony is that our careers continued to cross for decades. Ian later ran Virgin Sun and ended up sharing offices with me when I launched my first wave of independent businesses under the Urbanweb banner. Later, when I created On Holiday Group, Ian had moved from Travel Bargains to create Medhotels, which subsequently became one of our biggest competitors in the accommodation-only market, although by then Ian had sold out.

Yet despite repeatedly ending up on opposite sides commercially, we remained close friends and never actually worked in the same business.

For me, that has always been one of the great things about the travel industry. You could spend all day trying to take market share off somebody and then happily share a beer with them that evening at the Travel Weekly Globes. In the 1990s we were even luckier, regularly being dragged around some of America's best golf courses by car hire companies such as Dollar, Alamo and later Avis, who had discovered that corporate entertainment was a remarkably effective way of winning tour operator contracts.

I may have lost 18 golf balls that week in Florida, but I gained a friendship that has lasted more than 30 years.

On reflection, that was probably one of my better rounds.