Posted on September 9, 2010 - by Venik

Vladimir Raitz obituary

Russian-born pioneer of the package holiday abroad with Horizon

In May 1950, a DC-3 Dakota aircraft touched down on a runway built by American forces on the French island of Corsica. The 32 passengers on board were making a little bit of social history. They were the first true package tourists. The organiser of the trip was Vladimir Raitz, a pioneer of the postwar travel boom, who has died aged 88. Although others, notably Thomas Cook, had arranged inclusive leisure trips before, Vladimir was the first to operate holidays by charter flight.

It was no mean breakthrough. The state-owned British European Airways (BEA) objected to any kind of competition. At first the ministry of aviation warned Vladimir that his plan was unlikely to be approved, even though BEA did not fly to Corsica (its closest destination was Nice). Eventually, his newly established company, Horizon Holidays, was given the go-ahead – provided it carried only students or teachers.

Those early customers slept under canvas and were fed and supplied with as much red wine as they could drink, for a total price of £32 10s for the fortnight. It was not long before Horizon branched out into more familiar package territory, launching charter holidays to Mallorca. 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.

A Jewish White Russian, he was born in Moscow. In 1928 he emigrated with his mother to western Europe, where her parents had fled, leaving behind his father, whom he would never see again. His mother remarried and they moved with her second husband to Warsaw. His stepfather was one of the Polish officers murdered at Katyn.

Vladimir arrived in London in 1936, speaking Russian, Polish and German – but not a word of English. After Mill Hill school in north London, he read history at the London School of Economics. Vladimir worked for Reuters and United Press news agencies during the second world war, translating foreign news broadcasts. He related how he went to the Soviet embassy and volunteered to fight, but was refused.

When his grandmother left him £3,000, he sank it all into Horizon, setting up an office in Fleet Street. As the enterprise grew, he began to employ some of the earliest reps. One applicant he turned down was the future Tory MP and diarist Alan Clark. The rule restricting his clientele to students and teachers had been quickly abolished, but protectionism died hard. It was not until 1971 that he and other operators were allowed to sell packages for less than BEA’s normal scheduled fare on the relevant route.

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 was not envisaged as the vehicle for sun, booze and sex that it became under subsequent ownership.

He was cut from a different cloth from many of the early package holiday buccaneers. Unfailingly urbane and mordantly witty, he was also well read, with a passion for Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. He tried hard to maintain quality in the face of increasing competition from pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap tour operators which led to the scandals of the 1960s and a wave of complaints about unfinished or substandard hotels. He was proud of an independent survey which showed that Horizon received the fewest complaints.

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.

Vladimir stayed in and around the industry, as managing director of a company selling holidays to Malta, sitting on the board of Air Malta and getting involved in an operation to Cuba. He was also an influential figure at the Association of British Travel Agents.

When he launched his business, he said, he had provided a wide segment of the British public with a fortnight in the Mediterranean sun, previously the prerogative of the well-to-do members of the bourgeoisie. This created “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,” he said.

He is survived by Toni, his wife since 1954, and his daughters, Lucy, Sophie and Sarah.

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

Original article

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