As the Flight Centre Group sunsets its Gogo Vacations brand and offers best wishes to departing Gogo staff members, we are witnessing the closing act of one of the creators of the modern packaged travel industry, a company that ruled the segment for more than a generation.
Gogo was a wholesale arm that grew out of Liberty Travel, which was founded in 1951 by NYU classmates Fred Kassner and Gilbert Haroche. The wholesale division was originally founded in the late ‘50s as Keystone Tours.
Before he died in 2007, Fred Kassner told me how he and his partner innovated and built what became Gogo. Although escorted tours had existed in the American market for some time, developed by operators such as Collette, which started in 1918, and Tauck, which started in 1925, Kassner gave credit to Liberty/Gogo for the innovation of the independent vacation package as it came to exist.
“We were the first to put together packages of air, hotel and car rental using a schedule airline instead of a charter,” he said. “The difference was flexibility. We originated the concept of packaged vacations as a wholesaler, negotiating special rates by purchasing volume.”
They opened up a mass market by appealing to the rising post-war working and middle classes, people who were gaining economic clout at the same time that the airline industry was developing, and new possibilities for travel were opening. Gogo introduced them to possibilities they did not know existed. It became the model for a new industry that was growing up in the fabulous and prosperous ‘50s.
“We revolutionized the travel industry by introducing the vacation package concept,” he said. “By combining hotel accommodations, airfare and ground transportation to our initial two destinations, Puerto Rico and Florida, we became your neighborhood wholesaler.”
The vacation packages that did exist at the time, according to Kassner, mostly offered European travel and mostly high end. “Our innovation was doing it mass market as opposed to luxury,” he said. “In the ’30s and ’40s traveling was for the rich, students and teachers. The blue-collar workers went to the Jersey Shore, or the Catskills or Wisconsin Lakes. They didn’t go on cruises or to Miami. Our packages took that market and got them to travel. They didn’t know they could get all that for that price.”
Kassner and Haroche operated Liberty and Keystone, the wholesale and retail sides of the business, separately. Kassner headed the wholesale side and Haroche led the retail side. In the ‘60s they changed the name of Keystone to Gogo Tours. Later it changed again to Gogo Worldwide Vacations, because in the market the word “tour” had come to mean escorted travel, and Keystone offered independent vacation packages, not escorted tours.
Like its sister company, Gogo opened storefronts around the country, at one point building up 87 local offices nationwide. The company built the chain with a non-hierarchical management structure that gave its branches a lot of independence, using economic incentives that encouraged sales managers to exercise their entrepreneurial capacities to grow business for themselves, as well as for the company.
Gogo held onto its leadership in the Caribbean, Mexico and Florida for many years against the stiff competition of companies such as the Mark Travel Corp., Apple Vacations, Pleasant Holidays and Classic Vacations, all of which had built their own powerful niches in the segment by emulating what Gogo had started.
In the 1990s Kassner’s daughter Michelle moved up to take over the leadership of the company, still under the guidance of her father. Michelle Kassner had grown up in the travel industry. Her father had met her mother when she had been a client of the company.
Under her leadership, the company worked to upgrade the technology of the company to give it the power it would need to face the formidable rising competition of not only sharp operators in the wholesale segment, but even moreso to hold out against the rising tide of Online Travel Agencies.
The company also expanded its product line both by destination and by price, moving into more luxury products.
However, in spite of its efforts, in the 2000s Gogo was losing ground and market share, and the owners made the decision to sell to an international company that had a technological infrastructure that could be strong enough go head-to-head against the growing muscle of the OTAs.
After being purchased by Australia-based Flight Centre in 2007, Gogo went through many changes. Flight Centre expanded the product line to include its international destinations, rolling them out bit by bit, including Australia and New Zealand, then Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Egypt, followed by Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, then Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Bali, and by the end of 2009, South America, Africa, India and China. But then in June of 2011, it changed course and broke out the international brands, returning Gogo to its original core market, the Caribbean, Mexico and the USA.
Flight Centre changed the name from Gogo Worldwide Vacations to Gogo Vacations, absorbed it into its global operations, and in a rapidly changing market, Gogo gradually lost the luster it had had during its glory days from the ’50s through the ’90s.
Flight Centre’s announcement in late February marks the final end of the Gogo history. But while the brand is gone, the company left a powerful legacy that can still be traced in companies that followed in its wake.
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.
