⚫ In memoriam — Joshua Baer, founder of Capital Factory (1975–2026). Read the tribute →
§ Chapter Seven

Making History

First private-charter around-the-world programs in the industry. New offices in a tower named for a theater that no longer existed. And in the middle of it, a daughter named Christiane.

Rest-on-your-laurels was not in Barney's vocabulary. Once INTRAV was the dominant special-interest charter operator in its markets, he began looking harder — at both new verticals and at things the established travel industry had never bothered to attempt.

Of course, I was not one to rest on my laurels, so I continued looking for ways to expand the company and its offerings. Just as competitive as ever, I wanted to do better every year.

— Opening of Chapter Seven

Around the World, by Private Charter

INTRAV's next step was the thing almost nobody in civilian aviation was doing in the 1960s and '70s: around-the-world chartered flights. The itinerary ran Honolulu, Sydney, Hong Kong, New Delhi, the Serengeti. Barney's customers — who were doctors, lawyers, club members, alumni — were trying to see the world in the one vacation they could carve out of a working year. INTRAV gave them a single ticket, a single plane, a single expert leader, and stitched the whole thing together so they didn't have to book hotels or transfers themselves.

The cost economics, he writes in this chapter, were the whole game. You held costs down by doing everything on a bigger scale — dividing the start-up costs among as many people as possible. That meant you had to find more and more people who trusted INTRAV with their vacations. In most markets, by this point, Barney's company had no competition.

Once people saw what we were able to accomplish, that wasn't hard. We had no competition in most markets.

— The compounding machine

The Missouri Theater Building

Soon after the birth of Barney and Martine's daughter Christiane, INTRAV outgrew its original office. The company moved to the Missouri Theater Building at 634 North Grand in St. Louis. The name was a misnomer — the theater had been torn down in 1957 to make a parking lot for the tower — but the address stuck, and that tower was INTRAV's corporate home for the long middle act of the company's life.

Key Facts from Chapter Seven

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