Alan Ward - 50 years of holidays and hilarity

He’s been selling overseas holidays for about 50 years, around in the days when agents had to ring airlines ‘collect’ to book flights and write letters to Europe to book hotel rooms.

While the internet may have revolutionised the travel industry, surprisingly, Alan Ward’s Queenstown travel agency, Travelsmart, is still thriving, loyal locals who’ve booked through him for decades still doing so. “People trust and respect you. I’m very grateful. It’s all about doing the decent thing,” he says. Even if that means answering calls at 2am from clients overseas who just want it sorted.

While city agents had to advertise, Alan never has, instead having a beer with the locals on a Friday night, many becoming clients. In his early years in Queenstown this would be at The Mountaineer where pub manager Tony Hill always laid on free sausages and chips.

Raised in Dunedin, Alan took a job at Dalgety’s stock firm straight from Kings High School at 17, insisting he be placed in the travel office where he earned $3500 a year. “Stock firms offered everything back then with a big client base. Farmers would come to town, sell their wool, get the wool cheque then come book a holiday.”

He started in accounts, then as a junior selling Air NZ and NZR bus tickets and interisland ferry tickets.

“You’d have to allow eight months if booking an out of the way destination like Prague prior to the internet,” he says. “We had a big hotel index book, and we’d write to a hotel, a typist typing up a letter, asking them to write back advising a rate and availability. It was really primitive.”

Clients would sit at their desks smoking heavily, stubbing their butts out in the Pan Am ashtrays provided. “One girl hated that so much she threw the butts in the rubbish bin which caught fire.”

Working his way up to senior travel consultant Alan then scored a job advertised in the paper as a Mount Cook Airlines travel consultant in Queenstown in 1984. His mum, Joan Reid - the daughter of a Glenorchy scheelite miner and Rees Valley school teacher, had grown up here.

“(Rob) Muldoon had just devalued the dollar by 20% so it was cheaper for people to come here.”

Working under Geoff Houston, then Grant McMillan, who both left to set up on their own, Alan was soon managing Mount Cook’s Rees Street travel centre – his role, to increase international sales.

It was a fun 10 years and a constant battle to protect his reputation working with five female pranksters – Lois Stevens, Jackie Quickfall, Lauren Warwick, Sandy Mclaren and Janice Clear. “We had so much fun.

“The girls arranged a birthday cake for me one February. Bruce Leitch turned up from Avanti with this huge cake coated in cream,” Alan grins. “I went in with the knife and it exploded cream all over my shirt, glasses and face!” It was a balloon on a cow pat base, lathered in thick whipped cream. “I had to go home and change.” On another occasion Lois got adult magazines from Geoff Bradley’s bookshop and stacked them discreetly among the international travel brochures in Alan’s office display, clients reaching for brochures looking rather shocked. His desk calendar was also often sabotaged. “I’d have no idea. You’d get fired if you did that now,” he grinned.

The centre sold all the tourist trips in town, hotels booking for guests directly through them. “The rafting guides would turn up at 3pm on a Friday with a cask of wine,” he says.

Air NZ bought Mount Cook Airlines, greatly changing the travel landscape, so in 1994 Alan re-mortgaged his house and launched Southern Lakes Travel in Church Street. The sign said, ‘This office will make you want to leave town’, which lured them in. He then joined the Travelsmart franchise.

High rents forced him to a second-floor space in Shotover Street until Covid times when Alan lost 97% of his income. “I had two years of no income, living off my savings. I just treated it like early retirement, but boy, when the borders opened did it bounce back!”

He reckons he’s roughly $1m ahead of 2019 turnover and it’s been hard to keep up with demand. “People were taking two overseas holidays a year – one client went to Whistler skiing then took his wife biking in Croatia. It went crazy.”

It’s been a privileged life, with numerous, all expenses paid overseas familiarisation trips, upgraded to business class back in the day.

Unfortunately, there’s been the odd emergency and Alan’s had to “crank up the computer in the middle of the night”, not so much these days. “But that’s what you use a travel agent for. One call to me and the problem is solved,” he says.

Alan, a keen cyclist and member of The Pedallers, has been loyal to the community too through numerous Rotary projects, like the historic Shotover Bridge restoration - a Rotarian for more than 30 years.