Ninety years is a long, long time. Tour operators often proudly promote the fact that they have been in business for 20 years, and rightly so. That’s impressive. Keeping a tour operator in business through all the wars, stock market crashes, natural disasters and recessions of the last 20 years is a major accomplishment. Such events have taken down many along the way.
International tour operation is a business that is affected by every economic tremor and major event in the world. It’s not for anyone who wants to make an easy buck. It’s highly intensive work, surfing on a constantly changing, and sometimes dangerous market.
In that light, consider SITA World Tours, which has been in business since 1933. Try to imagine the world of 1933; it’s not easy. It seems there are few things that remain unchanged from that time.
Passenger air travel was just starting to take off. In 1930, 6,000 passengers flew on commercial airplanes. By 1934, the number had risen to 450,000. In four more years, the number would rise to l.2 million.
In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt had just taken office as president. The country was deep in a devastating recession, with a quarter of the working population, nearly 13 million people, unemployed. The U.S. Census Bureau says more than a million people went homeless that year. Other estimates place the number as high as 5 million.
Radio was still new on the American scene. TV had barely been imagined. World War II was still six years in the future.
That’s the scene in which SITA World Tours emerged. Starting a company to sell international travel was quite a far-fetched dream at such a time. It would have easily been dismissed as an impossibility by most sober-minded people not in the grip of a vision.
Today, the company is still in business, and takes travelers virtually everywhere on planet Earth. At its 90th anniversary, the company is reinventing itself yet again for the digital age.
Beginnings
The company was founded as Student International Travel Association by a married couple, Jack and Helen Dengler of Rancho Mirage, Calif.
It was founded on the wish to spread the joy of travel. As a young man in the navy, Jack Dengler had been able to experience travel. He wanted others to be able to enjoy it and be enlarged by it, as he had been.
SITA started out by offering students bicycle tours of Ireland, England, and Germany. After World War II, SITA was one of the first American companies to offer travel programs to South Africa and India. By that time, the students SITA had taken traveling in the early days had finished school. Still students of travel, they became the company’s new generation of clients.
Dengler closely watched developments that were taking place, and built the business along the lines of newly opening opportunities.
SITA put together charters to the Philippines and Hawaii and, when Pan Am Airlines started offering international service, SITA followed the expansion of routes and created packages for the newly emerging airline destinations, including Europe, India, Africa, China, Japan and Hawaii.
By the late 1950s, SITA had 22 branch offices around the world and the Denglers were finally looking toward retiring. They sold the company to Diner-Fugazy, the creator of Diners Club, the first charge card.
SITA 2.0
In 1982 SITA North America was purchased by its current owners, Mok Singh and Roger Mahal. Both Singh and Mahal had been born in India, but had been living in America for some time. They had already had broad professional and travel experience by the time they met in Kansas City. They found they shared a common vision for a travel company offering travel to exotic destinations.
In 1981, Singh and Mahal formed a partnership and founded Travel Promotions, Inc., in Los Angeles. It began as a tour operator, air consolidator, and general sales agent for various airlines. When SITA became available the next year, they purchased the company. With the purchase came SITA’s global infrastructure and the institutional memory of 50 years of operating tours around the world. They dug in and took on an educational project to learn everything they could about the business from those who had been doing it. That included the travel specialists within the company, supplier partners in the field, and the travel retailers that had been working with SITA.
They started with SITA’s offerings at the time: India, Africa, Asia, and China. Gradually they added Australia and New Zealand, South America, Greece, and European river cruising.
The company retains the institutional travel knowledge of generations, going back to the birth of the modern travel industry. SITA’s individual travel specialists today have experience going back 10, 15, 20 or more years.
Twenty-First Century Reinvention
SITA did not maintain a healthy, dynamic travel company for 90 years by standing still, and today’s SITA is in the midst of another reinvention. SITA’s mid-21 century incarnation is taking shape.
Mok Singh, owner and president, says that SITA is changing to reflect the changes of the world and the travel marketplace. “We are seeing significant changes occurring in the tourism space,” he told me. “Some of them we believe will be existential.”
Mok Singh says he saw similar changes in the aviation space in recent years, changes that amount to “essentially the commoditization of the aviation business.”
SITA sees some of the same kinds of changes moving into the tour space. “We’re seeing that the tour packaging industry is heading similarly in a direction of disintermediation, and to some extent commoditization,” he said.
SITA now is devising new ways to plug its vast knowledge and experience of international travel into digital platforms. The company is exploring partnerships that will harness the institutional knowledge it has built over generations and to place it within the kinds of sales platforms the younger travelers in emerging markets are comfortable working in.
In one of the most recent developments along that line, SITA has signed a deal with a large, publicly traded company that will make SITA the tour fulfillment center, the white label provider of the travel components that will be sold under other brands. The announcement of the white label deal will be coming within the next few weeks.
SITA is exploring a number of other partnerships that will give it more reach into the emerging digital marketplace. One of the companies SITA is in talks with is Mondee.
“What they’ve come up with is a concept called Mondee Marketplace,” said Singh. “What they’re attempting to do is to be able to provide the many users of their platform, not only air itineraries, pricing and so forth, which is what they’ve been doing, but to add to that tour packaging product, including city packages, weekend packages and things that lend themselves to that more commoditized kind of sales platform. They would be standard and packaged together as opposed to a highly curated, or specified itinerary with day-to-day activity over a long period of time. These are shorter and more modular packages.”
This will enable SITA to accommodate the needs of emerging markets, while still providing its traditional style of travel for those who want it, and prepare for the evolution of the younger travelers.
“Our traditional guest is older, generally well-traveled, and know what they want,” said Singh. “They are not comfortable with purchasing travel arrangements on the internet and would like a human being to be able to talk to, who can walk them through a complex itinerary. That’s our current clientele. We’re going to have to bridge this change that’s coming, where the younger clients, who are going to be our clients in the future, are much more comfortable doing things on the internet. So, we have to recreate ourselves to try to bring our level of service and expertise to a more digitized future.”
As younger clients evolve through some of the more commoditized packages, they are likely to begin to want more services and more curated arrangements. SITA will be ready for that.
“We are looking forward to moving ahead on automation and digitization, where we will be able to essentially warehouse all of the extensive data we have, which includes trip and tour information, hotel information and tariffs, which change very quickly in today’s environment, and be able to drive this data out to different types of storefronts on the internet. It could be driven at the backend by our data warehouse. So that’s the direction we’re looking at going in.
“I believe that being able to reach out to more and more storefronts or special interests, we would be able to draw customers that eventually get to talk to us, so that we can create trips to their particular needs and wants, but use digitization to get there.”
David Cogswell is a freelance writer working remotely, from wherever he is at the moment. Born at the dead center of the United States during the last century, he has been incessantly moving and exploring for decades. His articles have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Fortune, Fox News, Luxury Travel Magazine, Travel Weekly, Travel Market Report, Travel Agent Magazine, TravelPulse.com, Quirkycruise.com, and other publications. He is the author of four books and a contributor to several others. He was last seen somewhere in the Northeast US.
