Vladimir Raitz - The First Travel Pioneer

Continuing the theme of great travel entrepreneurs, let’s remember a true pioneer of the post-war package holiday industry; Vladimir Raitz.  

In the period from his first  trips to Corsica, Vladimir Raitz built the first, and one of the UK's most respected, holiday companies, Horizon Holidays, overseeing the business until the early 1970s.

Corsica for £32:10s per person and as much wine as you could put away

When Vladimir Raitz launched his business, few people could afford a foreign holiday. A return flight to Nice in 1950 for example, cost £70 (or about £1,700 today).  What Vladimir offered in 1950 was an all-inclusive package holiday to Corsica for £32 10s - including return flight, tented accommodation on the beach "delicious meat-filled meals and as much local wine as [you] could put away".

His first flight, with 11 paying customers looking forward to a week in the sun, took off from Gatwick in May 1950 in a government-surplus Dakota DC3. The plane landed at Lyon to refuel before continuing to Calvi. The whole journey took six hours.

Vladimir later recalled: "When we arrived at Corsica airport, there was nothing at all – not even a little hut. [We had] to shelter from the sun under the wings of the plane while we waited for the bus to pick us up." Once at the beach, the holiday-makers were greeted by large canvas tents, each with two beds. There was an area was set aside for "ablutions", a dining room, bar and dance-floor. "A pastis was a few pence," Raitz said, "a bottle of wine was nine pence."

His company was Horizon Holidays

Horizon Holidays..

 

Horizon soon added Majorca as a destination, followed by Sardinia, Malaga and Perpignan.  As it expanded, the firm added Tossa de Mar on the Costa Brava, then a small fishing village with a handful of hotels and bars and no bank. Vladimir later regretted the over-development of that part of the Catalan coastline.

None of this was achieved without difficulty. British European Airways objected to his flying to Corsica because it constituted "material diversion of traffic" – despite the fact that they did not fly to the island. And at first he was only allowed to carry teachers and students as all other occupations were banned!

There were also strict government regulations about how much money you could take on an overseas holiday: "At first it was £50, and that was later cut to £25," he recalled. "But we could keep the price of accommodation down to about £15, and the charter flight was payable in sterling, so there was still some spending money left over."

His Early Days in Russia, Berlin and Mill Hill

Vladimir Raitz was born to Jewish middle-class family in Moscow on May 23 1922. His father was a doctor and his mother, Cecilia, a qualified dentist. In 1927 Cecilia left Moscow to join her parents, who had fled to Berlin. She took Vladimir with her and he never saw his father again.

In Berlin he saw the rise of Hitler but in 1936, Vladimir joined his Grandparents in London and went to Mill Hill School. He arrived fluent in Russian, German, Polish and French, but with no English and yet by the end of his first term he was top of the class in that subject. 

Vladimir went on to the London School of Economics, where he read History, then joined the Reuters news agency. Throughout the Second World War he interpreted foreign news broadcasts for Reuters and United Press.

He was still working for Reuters when, in 1949, his grandmother died, leaving him £3,000. He left the agency, using his windfall to establish Horizon Holidays.

He was aware that since the end of the war there had been a surplus of government aircraft which were available for charter. Most were taken up for transporting cargo but Raitz saw a different opportunity, having just been invited by another expatriate Russian to visit Corsica, where the man was running a beachside "holiday camp".

Competition Appears

Even Vladimir could not have foreseen the huge expansion in holiday travel that was to follow his Corsica experiment. Between 1960 and 1967, the number of Britons going abroad soared from 2.25 million a year to 5 million. Horizon became one of the UK's largest operators, spawning Club 18-30, which was, he claimed, simply a holiday company for young people and not as a vehicle for sun, booze and sex that it later became.

However, the company could not cope with the vicious price war that broke out in the early 1970s, sparked off mainly by the biggest operator, Clarksons. Horizon began to lose money. After a desperate struggle to keep it afloat, the final blow was dealt by the oil price crisis which followed the 1972 Arab-Israeli war. In February 1974 it was taken over by Court Line, Clarksons' parent company. Court Line itself went bust shortly afterwards, owing £7 million to some 100,000 holiday-makers.

The collapse was particularly serious because there were then no proper bonds or protection schemes to safeguard people's holidays against bankruptcy. In the wake of the event, Civil Aviation Authority bonds and the Air Travel Reserve Fund were established.

Later Reflections on the Effects of Package Travel

Vladimir admited to having mixed feelings about the consequences of modern tourism. Benidorm, he noted in 1989, "looks bloody awful now – but that's progress, I suppose". More thoughtfully, he added: "On one hand, I hate to see resorts being despoiled. Take Minorca. There used to be a beach, no road to it, you used to scramble down through the scrub. Today it is ringed with hotels. To that extent, I am sad... On the other hand, I think it's marvellous that 12 or 13 million people can have a Mediterranean holiday and enjoy themselves."

"Providing a fortnight in the Mediterranean sun to a wide segment of the British public, hereto the prerogative of well-to-do members of the bourgeoisie, brought with it what can only be described as a social revolution; the man in the street acquired a taste for wine, for foreign food, started to learn French, Spanish or Italian, made friends in the foreign lands he had visited – in fact became more 'cosmopolitan', with all that that entailed."

And Thomson too..

Vladimir remained one of the principal players in the British tour operating business for 25 years. On behalf of Sir Gordon Brunton, of the Thomson organisation, for example, he acquired Skytours and Riviera Holidays, which merged to become Thomson Holidays.

Despite the downfall of Horizon, Raitz remained in the travel industry. During the late 1970s he organised tours for the Maltese Tourist Board where I had the pleasure of working alongside him at Medallion Holidays.

Vladimir Gavrilovich Raitz, entrepreneur, born 23 May 1922; died 31 August 2010