| Washington
Business Journal |
WOMEN
IN BUSINESS |
September
19-25, 2003 |
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| Omega
World Travel founder reaches for the moon |
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| BY TIM PAPPA CONTRIBUTING WRITER As if travel agents weren't depressed enough over the industry wide slump in tourism and business travel, Gloria Bohan has more bad news. "I don't think I'm going to retire,"' says the CEO and founder of Fairfax based Omega World Travel, the world's seventh-largest full-service travel agency, which bills itself as the largest woman-owned firm in the D.C. area. Travel agents all over the world should be cringing right now. TWO GRAND AND A LOT OF
MOXIE |
Today,
Bohan's cost-saving programs and Internet startups keep her financially
agile in an industry relentlessly battered by bankrupt airlines, blackouts,
terrorists and an economic depression. The corporate, group and leisure
travel provider grossed a little over $1 billion last year, just behind
the Falls Church office of Worldtravel BTI. The next-closest company
made a mere $104 million. Bohan says taking risks means constantly reinvesting in the business. One of those risks was bidding on government jobs, a move many businesses in 1982 would avoid, she says. It paid off though, as Omega, an $8 million company at the time, was awarded a $6 million contract to straighten out government travel logs. "You have to get out into the field if you're going to be a large business,"' Bohan says of catching the GSA train. "Because you need to be seen. That's one of the ways you survive." Case in point: When Bohan needed operators for a new call center in 1997, they came from an unlikely place - behind bars. She cut costs by employing female prisoners at the Leith Correctional Institution in Greenwood, S.C., for $3 an hour as reservation operators for travel agents. At the time Bohan insisted on women for the jobs. |
"Women
are just better at this," Bohan told Washington Business Journal
in 1997. "They don't have big egos, and they're more empathetic
and patient with the callers, " When South Carolina shut down the Leith call center and similar programs in 2000 amid concerns of male prisoners stealing credit card information, Bohan again changed gears. To stay competitive with agencies that operate solely online, she launched several Web sites, including Cruise.com, the leading cruise reservation site. The company even developed its own IT solutions program, TravTech, to keep things simple. "You have to have a backup plan at all times, for everything and everyone, if you want to move forward," she says. Almost half of Omega's customers are government. Combine that with Omega's online services, and federal clients may be deterred, says William Goldstein, CEO of Beltsville -based Travel-On. Many companies opt not to use online service, because it results in loss of productivity for each federal worker to make arrangements via the Web, he says. As much as online use is rising, it is still low, and will never exceed face-to-face arrangements, Goldstein says. However, Rochester, Wisc.-based Runzheimer International, a travel management analyst, reports that 91percent of all airline tickets are e-tickets. |
AIR SICKNESS Omega averted a $3 2 million breach- of- contract lawsuit by St. Louis-based TWA in 1997 by winning the right to sell discount tickets to its customers, even though the airline is not receiving that money. Friction between travel agencies and airlines stems back to 1994, when airlines capped travel agency commissions for the sale of domestic tickets. Now Omega faces an industry in which airlines continue to file for Chapter 11. "I have a strong infrastructure," Bohan says. "We've been able to weather a lot of the storm. We have depended so much on the airlines. They still control us in a lot of ways." Neither has corporate travel been putting as much into the pot as it used to. "I don't think it will ever, ever be how it used to be," Travel-On's Goldstein says. "There was a time when corporate travel accounted for 80 percent of the airlines. Business travelers historically have paid more, because of so many last-minute flights. You can charge more."' There's always the moon. Bohan is co-founder of Arlington-based Space Adventures, a company promoting private space tourism. |
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