Travel Weekly Digital Edition - 50th Anniversary Edition

MONTAGE
FROM THE ARCHIVES
COME AGAIN

Continued from Page 8

The headline actually dates from Sept. 19, 1977, when ASTA began an even earlier project to develop an ID card program for members. The cards were to be voluntary and available for “a nominal fee.” As the story reported, ASTA “hopes to encourage all industry suppliers to make it a standard practice to ask agents to prove who they are before granting reduced-rate privileges.”

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NEW PASSPORTS ARE
DESIGNED TO REDUCE FRAUD

This could be a reference to last year’s introduction of computer chips in U.S. passports — but it’s not. The headline is from April 15, 1993, and refers to “high tech” features to reduce fraud, such as the holographic image superimposed over the photo, imprints on the visa pages to make each one different plus new inks and paper. Such was “high tech” a mere 15 years ago.

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‘The plot to kill travel’

One of the industry’s biggest scares of the 1960s was President Lyndon Johnson’s proposal for a tax on travel.

As early as 1965 there had been talk of a “travel gap,” as prosperous Americans were traveling more and spending more overseas than their international counterparts spent here.

To improve the balance of payments, Johnson urged Americans to curtail international travel. He also proposed taxes on foreign spending by U.S. tourists, a 5% international ticket tax on air travel and a per diem tax on all transportation after a traveler had spent 12 hours at a primary destination.

In his report on Jan. 9, 1968, Alan Fredericks, then managing editor of Travel Weekly, called it “the 1968 version of the shot heard round the world.”

Editor and publisher Irwin Robinson attacked the tax plan in an editorial under the headline “The Plot to Kill Travel.”

A stunned industry mobilized itself and public opinion to fight the plan and to encourage inbound travel as a constructive way to ease the so-called “travel gap.”

To project the message beyond the industry, Travel Weekly ran full-page ads in the New York Times and the Washington Post.

On Capitol Hill, industry witnesses testifying in opposition to the proposals received top-level congressional backing by the Senate and House minority leaders, both Republicans. Rep. Gerald Ford said the move was “like trying to treat cancer with a Band-Aid.”

“The Johnson administration abandoned the idea of curbing U.S. travel abroad,” Fredericks reminisced in Travel Weekly’s 25th Anniversary issue in 1983. But he noted that Johnson “continued to imply that travel outside this country was less than patriotic.”

FOREIGN SHIPLINES FACE
TIGHTER U.S. CONTROLS

This story reported a move by U.S. Customs to crack down on the cruise line practice of including brief stops at foreign ports on cruises that operate between two U.S. points, and it singled out one particular itinerary that included a brief stop in Ensenada, Mexico, on cruises from the West Coast to Hawaii.

The story said cruise lines serving Hawaii and Alaska were particularly worried about the proposed restrictions.

You’d be correct if you said this sounds suspiciously like a story that broke last year, when Customs launched a crackdown on token calls at Ensenada.

But it only sounds like it.

This headline and story appeared 35 years ago, on Jan. 2, 1973.

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I REMEMBER
EXECUTIVE ADVISES RETAILERS
TO CATER TO BABY BOOM
GENERATION

REMEMBER

Continued from Page 8

knowledge of travel was basically limited to the fastest way to get to Belmont Park.

Fortunately for me, the powers at TW bet a long shot and hired me to manage the publication’s destination writers, a talented group whose firsthand knowledge of

the world was impressive.

The first time I was responsible for running the news side of Travel Weekly — most of the top editors were either on vacation, ill or otherwise indisposed — I walked into the traditional early-morning news meeting with five “OK” stories I confi-

See REMEMBER on Page 12

This headline refers to some pretty common advice, so we’ll give you a clue: the executive is Bob Dickinson, who retired last year from a long career at Carnival Cruise Lines. That takes care of the Who and the What, but When was this sage advice offered?