Hank Armand, A Travel Visionary

Hank Armand is regarded as something of a visionary in the ultra-competitive world of travel and tourism. Nowadays, booking flights to distant climes has been made easy thanks to the Internet. But this has not always been the case. Some twenty years ago, booking even a simple two-week holiday took considerable time and effort – not to mention the expense of booking fees, travel agent costs, and greatly inflated airfares. How times have changed. The Internet has made booking a holiday as easy as buying a CD – and this is due in no small measure to the foresight and ingenuity of people like Hank Armand.

Hank Armand started his first travel agency more than 30 years ago. By his early twenties he was already a confirmed backpacker – no small feat in itself in those days of high airfares, inefficient tour operators, and frequently fraudulent hoteliers. Moreover, the choice of destination was limited to the amount of contacts any individual travel agency held in its portfolio. In practical terms, this often meant traipsing from one agency to another, merely in order to reach a particular place at a particular time. It was a frequently tedious, expensive, and frustrating process – and if one were to offer one single reason for Hank Armand deciding to enter the travel and tourism business it would be down to his own experiences of traveling in those dark times. Indeed, much more could be said about Hank Armand and his frustrations of dealing with tour operators.

However, it was mainly due to those experiences that led Hank Armand to consider the possibility of setting up his own travel agency. After a period spent studying the strategies of travel agencies, he realized that there was a definite gap in the market for an innovative and forward-thinking travel agency. From little acorns do mighty oaks grow. First one and then another of his agencies prospered. Indeed, he seemed to have a Midas touch in business, and it was not long before he was a bona-fide self-made millionaire. And then the Internet came along.

Unlike some of his competitors, Hank Armand was quick to see its potential for facilitating travel. He created the first of many travel sites online and this allowed him to offer a greater range of holiday destinations at a far lower price than he had been able to do before. Success followed success. Thanks to the vision of Hank Armand, we are now able to travel to virtually anywhere in the world – safely, comfortably, and cheaply. Find out more about Hank Armand on Scoop.it