INTRAV — Making History

The word thesis does not appear in Barney Ebsworth’s autobiography. Barney was a Mizzou-and-Wash-U-trained accountant turned travel-business operator, not a graduate-school theorist, and he was congenitally allergic to vocabulary that puffed an idea up larger than its working clothes. But the moment that founded INTRAV — the company that would become his life’s defining business and the platform from which everything that followed (Royal Cruise Line, Clipper Cruise Line, the art collection, the Hunts Point years) was launched — was a thesis moment in every meaningful sense. It was a single observation about how rich people were spending their vacations that, properly applied, would build a national company over the next thirty-two years. It happened, of all places, in a Paris bar.

The year was 1966. Barney had been the sole owner of International Travel Advisors for four years, since paying off John Jenkins in 1963. The agency had grown from the wig-shop office in Alton to a sixteen-employee operation specializing in special-interest charter tours for university alumni associations, professional societies, and industry guilds. It was profitable. It was geographically constrained, almost entirely, to the St. Louis metropolitan area. Barney had turned down a $350,000 buyout offer in 1965 and a vice-chancellorship at Washington University the same afternoon. He was thirty-two years old, working seventy-hour weeks, and increasingly aware that the special-interest charter model he had built was a regional implementation of an idea that could be implemented nationally if the right structural decisions were made.

What Barney did not yet have was the specific articulation of the structural decision that would unlock the national version of his business. He found it in Paris, in a bar, after midnight, drinking with a man whose name his autobiography preserves only as Ed.

The Bar in Paris — A $500,000-a-Year Man on a Six-Dollar Tour

Ed was one of the top sales agents at International Travel Advisors. As the agency’s special-interest tour business grew through the early 1960s, Barney had increasingly relied on Ed to close the harder accounts — the larger universities, the more discriminating professional associations — and Ed’s annual income from commissions on those accounts had risen to a level neither man had imagined possible when Ed had first come to work for Barney. By 1966, Ed was earning approximately $500,000 a year on the books at ITA. In 1966 American purchasing power, that was the salary of a senior corporate vice president. Ed was, by any reasonable mid-career professional standard, rich.

In late 1966 the two men were on the same alumni rat-race tour through Europe — Barney as the company principal, dropping in for a few days; Ed as the working tour leader for the booked group. They had finished a long Geneva-to-Paris drive day with the alumni, deposited the group at their hotel, and then gone out for the evening to one of the cabaret revues, a couple of bars, a late dinner. They got back to their own hotel rooms, separately, around four in the morning. Ed, who was at this point both half drunk and reflective, told Barney that this was the first time he had been drunk since medical school. The two men shook hands. Each went to bed.

The next morning Barney slept until almost noon. Ed, who had to be on duty with the alumni group again, got up at eight a.m., dressed in the casual touring clothes the agency’s tour leaders were issued, and led the alumni on the day’s sightseeing — a six-dollar-per-person Paris bus tour through the Tuileries and the Arc de Triomphe, the standard package they had bought as part of the trip.

Barney spent the entire following day, riding back to his next meeting in another European city, turning the contrast over in his head. Ed earned $500,000 a year. Ed was on vacation, more or less, in a city he loved. Ed had stayed up until four in the morning the night before. And Ed had gotten up at eight a.m. to ride a six-dollar bus tour with a bunch of people he had brought along on a routine alumni package. As Barney later phrased it in his autobiography, the question that would not leave his head was simple: Why?

The answer, Barney concluded over the next several weeks of thinking, was that the travel industry as it then existed had no offering positioned to a half-million-dollar-a-year customer. The standard alumni rat-race tours Barney himself had built were good products for working-class teachers and middle-class professionals, but they were not designed for a man whose hourly rate, calculated against his $500,000 income, was approximately two hundred and forty dollars. Ed was, on the morning of the six-dollar bus tour, paying about three hundred dollars per hour of his own opportunity-cost time to ride a Paris bus around landmarks he could have hired a private guide to walk him through. The travel industry was, in effect, leaving the upper end of its potential market entirely unserved.

Barney decided that this would be the unserved market that International Travel Advisors began serving. Not in addition to the rat-race business; instead of it. The agency would reposition itself as a first-class, private-charter operator selling premium custom-itinerary travel to the unserved upper-middle-class and high-net-worth professional market that Ed represented. The pricing would be at a tier most of the agency’s existing customer base could not afford. The volume per customer would be ten to thirty times higher. The margin would be at a level the rat-race business had never approached. And the customer, who was paying for a level of attention and customization that did not exist anywhere else in the American travel industry of the late 1960s, would, in Barney’s expectation, never go anywhere else.

The repositioning required, among other things, a new name. International Travel Advisors was the name of an Alton storefront agency. The new business would be a national premium charter operator. It needed a name with the characteristics of every successful business name of the postwar era: short, distinctive, abstract enough to imply scale, easy to put on a brochure cover, easy to say into a telephone. Barney coined a word from the first three letters of international followed by a clipped suggestion of travel. The name was INTRAV. He registered the trade name in early 1967.

The 1967 B-or-B Year, Reframed

The year 1967 was the one Barney had named, before it began, with the deliberately bracing internal label B or B — big time or bankruptcy. The label was, in retrospect, slightly more dramatic than the underlying financial situation strictly required. The agency had retained earnings, a profitable operating base, and an established alumni-tour brand to fall back on if the repositioning failed. But the label captured exactly the psychological commitment Barney was demanding of himself and the small leadership team he was assembling. Either INTRAV would become a national premium-travel company in the following twelve to eighteen months, or it would not, and Barney was not prepared to operate the business indefinitely in any intermediate state.

The first concrete operational changes were structural. Barney moved the company headquarters from the Alton storefront to a high-rise office building on North Grand Boulevard in St. Louis, fifteen miles south of the original wig-shop location and across the river in Missouri. The new address was 634 North Grand. The building was called the Missouri Theater Building — named for a movie palace that had once stood on the ground floor and that had been demolished in 1957 to create a parking lot. The name remained on the building’s facade and in the local directories, despite the fact that there was no longer a theater anywhere on the property. Barney leased a substantial floor-and-a-half of office space, designed it for a company three times the size of the one he was about to build into it, and gave the new INTRAV operation an address that would imply, to any future client receiving correspondence on the new letterhead, that the company was already established at scale.

The second concrete operational change was the hiring of the first generation of INTRAV-specific staff. Barney did not want a duplicate of himself; he had already concluded, in the planning the year before, that hiring a second Barney Ebsworth would simply create his own future competitor. He wanted specialists. He wanted a person who could sell, a person who could design itineraries, a person who could manage vendor relationships abroad, and a person who could handle the brochures and direct-mail marketing that the new business would depend on.

His first INTRAV salesman, hired in late 1966 in preparation for the launch year, was a man who had spent his career selling Adler typewriters into the American small-business market — a category that competed against IBM’s much larger and better-known typewriter line. Barney had not wanted to hire a former IBM salesman, on the deliberate theory that anyone who had spent a career selling a product everybody already wanted was the wrong person to sell INTRAV’s new and unfamiliar premium-travel offering. The Adler salesman, who had built his career on the cold-call discipline of explaining an unfamiliar product to a buyer who had not yet heard of it, was, in Barney’s reckoning, the right fit. The salesman started in late 1966 and brought in three new alumni-association accounts in his first six months on the job — not yet the premium customers INTRAV would eventually serve, but a quick early proof that the model could be executed by someone other than Barney himself.

The Orient Adventure

The first signature product of the new INTRAV was a private-charter tour of the Far East that Barney named the Orient Adventure. The itinerary, as designed for the inaugural 1967 departure, ran approximately three weeks: a transpacific charter from Los Angeles to Honolulu for a one-night Hawaiian decompression stop, then on to Tokyo, Kyoto, Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Singapore. The hotels were the best available in each city — the Imperial in Tokyo, the Peninsula in Hong Kong, the Oriental in Bangkok. The ground transportation was private cars rather than tour buses. The local guides were senior bilingual professionals with university backgrounds in art history or East Asian culture, paid substantially above the local guide rate. The booked clientele was a mix of senior university alumni, partners from the larger national law and accounting firms that INTRAV’s sales operation had begun cultivating, and a handful of West Coast art collectors who heard about the trip through their dealer networks and signed up.

The Orient Adventure was, in 1967 American travel-industry terms, a remarkable product. The standard premium American tour to the Far East at that point ran for around fifteen days, used scheduled commercial flights between cities, billeted clients in middle-tier international hotels, and used local tour-bus operators with English-speaking but unspecialized guides. INTRAV’s offering changed every variable upward by one significant tier. The pricing reflected the tier change: an Orient Adventure seat in 1967 cost between $4,500 and $6,500 depending on cabin class on the charter aircraft and choice of hotel suite category in the cities — comfortably more than half the median annual American household income at the time. The customer base could afford it. The customer base, in fact, had been waiting for it.

The Welcome Junk in Victoria Harbor

Among the operational signatures Barney built into the Orient Adventure’s execution was a small, theatrical, deliberately staged moment of Hong Kong arrival that the autobiography preserves as a single sentence and that the cousin’s working biography is going to slow down for a paragraph and a half. Hong Kong in 1967 was a British Crown Colony of approximately three and a half million people, the principal financial entrepôt between mainland China and the Western Pacific, and a city whose Victoria Harbor crossing was the standard arrival experience for any visitor of any tier. The crossing on the Star Ferry between Kowloon and Central was the postcard image of the city.

For each Orient Adventure departure’s first Hong Kong morning, Barney had INTRAV’s local fixer hire a small traditional Chinese sailing junk — a wooden vessel with the distinctive batten-stiffened red sails that had been the working watercraft of southern coastal China for centuries — and rig it with a custom-painted banner that read, in large English block letters, WELCOME, INTRAV ORIENT ADVENTURE. The junk was positioned in the harbor near the Star Ferry crossing and instructed to sail conspicuously past the inbound boat carrying that morning’s arriving INTRAV passengers, displaying the banner toward the inbound ferry’s Hong Kong-side rail.

The clients, on their first sight of Victoria Harbor, saw a Chinese junk welcoming them by name. The cost was negligible. The marketing effect, in the years before any of these clients had encountered the now-routine American practice of personalizing every detail of a luxury travel experience, was disproportionate. The Orient Adventure became known, in the small national network of INTRAV-aware professional travel buyers, as the trip with the welcome junk. Repeat bookings climbed. Referrals climbed. A small, cheap, theatrical detail, planned and executed by a thirty-three-year-old Mizzou accountant in a Missouri Theater Building office twelve thousand miles away, did the marketing work that no amount of American direct-mail brochure copy could have done.

The Keys to Kyoto

The Orient Adventure’s Kyoto stop, designed as a two-night cultural-immersion stay between the Tokyo and Hong Kong segments, focused on the city’s temples, gardens, and traditional craft workshops. INTRAV’s local guide for the Kyoto segment was a senior cultural-affairs professional who had been a docent at the Kyoto National Museum and could speak to clients about both the surface and the deep cultural meaning of each site they visited. The trip was, in volume terms, modest from Kyoto’s point of view; the city received millions of foreign visitors per year and the few hundred annual INTRAV clients constituted a rounding error in that total. But the trip was distinguished by an attention to its hosts that Kyoto’s tourism authorities noticed.

On one of Barney’s in-person trips to Kyoto in the late 1960s — he had a habit, throughout the INTRAV years, of joining one or two Orient Adventures per year for a few days, partly to monitor execution and partly to maintain the senior-relationship work that kept the international vendor network reliable — the mayor of Kyoto invited Barney to City Hall and presented him with a ceremonial set of keys to the city. The presentation was a recognition of INTRAV’s contribution to Kyoto’s American-tourism profile. The keys were, in literal civic-protocol terms, modestly significant. In the symbolic terms in which Barney filed the experience in his memory, they were the first municipal honor of his career, given to a thirty-three-or-thirty-four-year-old American businessman by the elected leader of one of the most culturally significant cities on the planet, in recognition of work he had been doing for less than two years.

It would not be his last municipal honor. Over the next two decades, INTRAV’s relationships in Hong Kong, Bangkok, Athens, Istanbul, Helsinki, Stockholm, and several other cities would produce similar recognitions. Barney never displayed them prominently in his offices. He kept them in a private cabinet at home and, late in life, told his daughter Christiane that the Kyoto presentation was the one that had meant the most to him because it was the first.

Around the World by Private Charter

By 1969, INTRAV had executed three successful Orient Adventures and was selling the fourth and fifth out months in advance of departure. Barney’s next strategic move was the most ambitious INTRAV had yet attempted: around-the-world private-charter air programs. The concept was a single multi-week itinerary that would charter an entire commercial jet aircraft, board a closed group of approximately one hundred and forty INTRAV clients, and circumnavigate the globe over four to six weeks — with stops, depending on the year’s itinerary, in Honolulu, Sydney or Auckland, Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok, New Delhi, the Serengeti or Cairo, Athens, and back across the Atlantic to New York or directly to St. Louis.

The product had no precedent in the American travel industry of the late 1960s. Around-the-world commercial scheduled flights existed; they were operated by Pan American World Airways and a small handful of other major international carriers. Around-the-world group tours existed; they were operated by Cooks, Thomas Cook, and a few specialty operators, almost always using scheduled flights and accumulating the participants city by city. What did not exist was a single closed group on a single chartered aircraft moving as a unit through the entire circumnavigation, with a single tour leader, a single set of pre-arranged hotel and ground arrangements, and a single seat assignment held by each client for the duration. INTRAV’s implementation of the closed-group around-the-world concept was the first of its kind from any American operator.

The first INTRAV around-the-world program departed in 1970. It sold out. The second one, in 1971, sold out faster. By 1972 the around-the-world program had become an annual signature INTRAV product, with bookings open eighteen months in advance and a waiting list that the sales team began rationing among the agency’s most-favored repeat clients. The around-the-world model would, over the following two decades, evolve to include several variations — an annual Pacific Rim circumnavigation, an annual Africa-and-Mediterranean program, and eventually, in 1987, the famous around-the-world program flown on a chartered Concorde that became one of INTRAV’s most-marketed signature products.

Christiane

The personal life of the Ebsworth family during the launch years of INTRAV was, by Barney’s deliberate design, kept separate from the company’s public profile. He did not put his children’s names on the company letterhead. He did not write their names into the brochure copy. He did not mention them in the trade-press interviews INTRAV occasionally received. His one and only child, born in the late 1960s as INTRAV was reaching its first scaled-revenue year, was given the French name Christiane in honor of Martine’s older sister — the same Christiane who had given the silent nod of approval at the USO in Paris on December 31, 1956, and who was now Christiane Ebsworth Ladd’s namesake aunt.

Christiane Ebsworth grew up in the Sumac Lane house in Ladue. She had a French mother, an English-by-descent father who had been raised in a one-and-a-half-paycheck St. Louis Depression-era apartment, and a daily life that was, by the standards of any American executive family of the period, comfortable but not ostentatious. She would, in the next decade, become an unintentional witness to her father’s art collecting, a participant in the Hunts Point years that were still thirty-five years off, and, in 2018, the sole executor of the Barney A. Ebsworth Living Trust who would be required to make the single most consequential decision of the family’s post-Barney era: whether to honor the partial Seattle Art Museum bequest as Barney had verbally articulated it in 2007, or whether to send the collection to Christie’s and, in November 2018, set the world auction record for Edward Hopper. None of that was visible from the Sumac Lane front porch in 1969. None of it could have been.

Bigger Than the Big Guys

By the close of the 1971 fiscal year — four full years after the INTRAV rebrand and the move to the Missouri Theater Building — the company had become the largest specialty premium-travel operator in the United States by per-trip volume in the high-end Far East and around-the-world charter categories. The conventional industry-leader designation in the broader American travel-agency category still belonged to American Express Travel and to Thomas Cook’s American operations, which between them booked many multiples of INTRAV’s passenger count. But in the specific market segment INTRAV had identified and built — closed-group private-charter premium travel for high-income American professionals — the company had no peer.

The closing line of Chapter Six of Barney’s autobiography — the chapter titled simply INTRAV — states the situation in his characteristic understated five-word summary, the one that would, in the cousin’s reading, be the unstated motto of the next twenty-eight years of the company’s operations:

The story of what Barney did with that platform — the founding of Royal Cruise Line in 1972, the founding of Clipper Cruise Line in 1981, the early foundation of the art collection that would, decades later, sell at Christie’s for three hundred and seventeen million dollars — is the subject of Part VI. The platform on which all of that was built was the company that had been launched in 1967 from a Missouri Theater Building floor-and-a-half on North Grand Boulevard, by a thirty-two-year-old Mizzou-and-Wash-U accountant who had spent the previous four years thinking about the Paris bar conversation in which a half-million-dollar-a-year sales agent had explained, by his eight-a.m. boarding of a six-dollar bus, exactly what was missing from the American travel industry of the late 1960s.

What was missing was the company Barney built. He built it deliberately. He named it deliberately. He moved it deliberately into the headquarters address that would carry its operations for the next thirty-two years. By the close of 1971 it was, in his own dry phrasing, bigger than the big guys. By the close of 1999, when he sold it to Kuoni Reisen Holding AG of Zürich on his sixty-fifth birthday, it would have generated the personal fortune that was the foundation under everything that followed.

The next part of the book follows the fleet.