INTRAV

The insight that built INTRAV arrived, as good insights often do, at the wrong hour. Barney took one of his best sales agents out for a night in Paris — the Folies, a couple of bars — and rolled in around four in the morning. The agent, a man who made half a million dollars a year, was up at eight for a six-dollar group sightseeing tour with a busload of strangers. It nagged at Barney all day. Why would a rich man, on vacation, drag himself out of bed at dawn for a cut-rate tour? Because it was included, and people take what's included.

There was the whole thesis in one hungover morning. Wealthy people were buying the same rigid, sightseeing-crammed tours as everyone else, because nobody had ever built them anything better. So Barney would. He stripped the mandatory sightseeing out, made it optional, dropped the price about a hundred and fifty dollars, and handed people back their freedom: a plane ticket, an airport transfer, a first-class hotel, an American breakfast, a choice of ten great restaurants for dinner, and a hospitality desk to arrange the rest — “and I'll do it all for $898.” To carry the new idea he gave the company a new, catchier name. From now on, it would be INTRAV.

Bases Loaded

Then he made the bet that could have ended it all. For 1967 — his “big time or bankruptcy” year — Barney booked ten Boeing 707s from Northwest Orient Airlines and ran them back to back to the Far East: Tokyo, Kyoto, Hong Kong. First-class meals, open bar, roughly 165 passengers per plane. Nobody in the business had ever attempted back-to-back charters before. He explained it with a baseball diagram he clearly loved:

To fill ten planes he needed groups, and the groups he found were gloriously American. He started at the Missouri Athletic Club, then the Indianapolis and Illinois Athletic Clubs, then two private clubs in Texas — the Cipango Club in Dallas and the Cork Club in Houston. (Texas was dry; private clubs were how respectable people drank.) The brochure hook was irresistible: “Now two can travel for the price of one!”

The Cork Club came with a cameo. It was owned by the oil wildcatter Glenn McCarthy — a Time-cover legend, a pal of Howard Hughes, and the model for Jett Rink, the character James Dean played in Giant. On the way over, the cab driver warned Barney that taxi drivers wouldn't pick McCarthy up anymore because he kept getting drunk and knocking people out. McCarthy duly sauntered into the room, looked Barney over, and walked back out without a word. Afterward, asked how the meeting with the famous man had gone, Barney gave the only honest answer:

A Welcome Junk, and a Body in the Harbor

As showmanship, Barney chartered a Chinese junk in Hong Kong, hung a banner across it reading “Welcome, INTRAV Orient Adventure,” and had it sail out to greet his passengers on their first crossing of Victoria Harbor. It very nearly got swamped by the wake of the Star Ferry. And then Barney looked down into the water and saw something that stopped the theater cold: a dead body, floating. The Red Guard was killing people up in Canton, and the chaos was reaching the harbor. An Iowa doctor who'd booked the trip leaned over the rail beside him and said, with terrible calm, “I'm only a small-town doctor in Iowa, but I'm certain that's a dead body floating there.”

Two months before departure, a red banner headline had screamed “Red Guard Runs Amok in Hong Kong.” Barney braced for cancellations. Not one charter emptied. In Kyoto the mayor handed him the keys to the city for the tourist traffic INTRAV was bringing — the first of many municipal keys he'd collect. And when it was over, all ten planes had sold out.

By 1969 INTRAV was using all thirty of the charter flights Japan permitted from the United States each year. A bad year now meant three million dollars in revenue — “No matter what your economic comfort level is,” Barney noted dryly, “you can live on $3 million a year.” And after seven years of sleeping, by his own account, every other night, the gamble finally let him rest: “For the first time in seven years, I really slept.”