Up Front With Martin B. Deutsch for 2001

December 31: MALONEY’S ASTA AFTER 9/11
It was a different world when I conducted my interview with Bill Maloney a week or two before September 11. At the time, Maloney, ASTA’s executive vice president and chief operating officer, and I were anchored in a time of more certainty and less strife — or so we thought. Now, nearly four months after that catastrophic day, Maloney says, “The world and the travel industry have turned on their axes.”

September 17: YOUNGMAN: A CARIBBEAN CAREER
The Caribbean’s currents never rest, either below or above the surface. This dynamic is particularly applicable to tourism, the region’s leading industry, which is moved by factors political, economic and social, not to mention the whims of weather. In the vortex of this energy we find Michael Youngman, who retires at the end of this year after a decade as director of marketing worldwide for the Caribbean Tourism Organization.

July 16: TRAVEL AND THE (DALY) HEADLINES
If there’s one enduring figure in this industry who we all run across, literally, every time we turn around at a convention, conference, seminar or board meeting, it’s Don Daly. For more than four decades, Daly has carried the flag for American Express, and while his days on the road have been somewhat reduced since his formal retirement in 1997, his consulting role keeps him flying off on domestic and international assignments.

June 18: THE U.K. BECKONS AS ‘SCARE’ WANES
With the most overblown travel crisis in my memory beginning to recede, or at least stabilize, there’s a modicum of hope that the U.K. in particular and Europe in general will recoup some of the U.S. bookings lost because of hoof-and-mouth disease. Spurred by curiosity, I accepted a recent invitation by Millennium Hotels to see for myself. "The state of the U.S. economy is potentially more dangerous [to tourism] than hoof-and-mouth," claimed Tony Potter, Millennium-Copthorne’s chief operating officer.

May 21: UPDATE: NO BLUES IN BILOXI
By 1997, four years after the debut of gaming on the Gulf Coast, this 26-mile Gulf Coast crescent had catapulted into third place in casino-driven revenues behind Nevada ($17.3 billion) and Atlantic City ($3.75 billion), with nearly $1 billion in dollar volume. How have Biloxi and its neighbors fared in the last four years? While the area has slowed its considerable growth in this, the eighth year of the casino/resort infusion, locals talk about more hotel rooms, expanding air service, new museums and other cultural attractions.

April 16: AMBITIOUS GOALS FOR AUSTRIAN AIR
Guenther Hude took over last September as Austrian Airlines' general manager of the Americas after decades of responsible assignments for the airline across Europe. Hude's goal is to make the U.S. market more aware of Central and Eastern Europe’s many attractions. "Austria is the door to all these countries, and we want to develop more tour product to reflect this objective," Hude says.

March 19: FOOTLOOSE AND FANCY-FREE AT SEA
A division of Norwegian Cruise Line--owned, in turn, by Star Cruises of Singapore--Orient Lines defies more of the conventional beliefs that beguile cruise lines’ executive suites. “We were a profitable one-ship company, now we’re a solidly profitable two-ship company” in an industry that believes bigger is better, says Mitchell Schlesinger, Orient’s senior vice president of sales, marketing and passenger services.

February 19: ED HOGAN IN PARADISE FOUND
The loquacious and gregarious Ed Hogan founded Pleasant Hawaiian Holidays in 1959 and never looked back. In recent years the Hogans--Ed, Lynn and their four children--have also looked south, to Mexico, and out to the vast Pacific beyond Hawaii, with Europe on the horizon in 2002. Never one for understatement or half-measures, Ed has outpromoted, outsold (and out-talked) his competitors to the point where he carries as many as 450,000 clients to Hawaii every year.

January 22: AGENT INSIGHTS FROM DELTA
Frederick Reid, who’s been at Delta Air Lines since the summer of 1998 as executive vice president and chief marketing officer, has been immersed in the airline industry since his earliest years. His father, the late Dan Reid, was at TWA in its halcyon days for 34 years. The younger Reid claims Delta "looks after our customers with passion; we [have] a very sharp focus.”

Copyright © 1992-2007 by Martin B. Deutsch. All rights reserved.