To understand the industry's culture, it is necessary to have a sense of its history. Therefore, relying upon various members' web sites and their links, as well as upon interview data, contemporary documents, and data retrieved from the historical archives made available to the researcher, a brief history of the industry — i.e. perceived facts that represent an important "strand" in the "web" of culture — was constructed.

The American student travel industry has its roots in the Mormon tradition of sponsoring travel overseas for missionary purposes. In 1964, two Mormon businessmen, Hilton & Debry, took advantage of their connections in this regard and created "the progenitor of American student travel companies," the Foreign Language League, later to be re-named the Foreign Study League (FSL) (ALSG, 1989, 5). The FSL experiment was duplicated the following year in Cincinnati, Ohio, by three Proctor & Gamble breakaway executives who organized the American Institute for Foreign Study, AIFS. According to one source, "AIFS experienced "exponential growth" (Z, 4-3) taking students on six-week summer programs that located them in various university or quasi-university residence situations for a combination of travel and (mostly) academic/language studies. These two enterprises, FSL and AIFS, dominated the market throughout the remainder of the 1960s, until FSL was acquired by Transamerica, Inc., and later by Reader's Digest, which subsequently withdrew its interest and suspended operations of FSL in the late 1970s. During these early years, several companies came and went.

According to its founder, Dr. Gilbert Scott Markle, the company called American Leadership Study Groups (ALSG ) was already in the offing by 1965, at which time he approached AIFS for "help and advice" in the endeavor. AIFS suggested that he "abandon his plans to organize a competitor company and sign on with AIFS instead" (Markle, 1995, 5). Markle declined, and his subsequent decision to forge ahead with the new company "helped solidify AIFS's competition" for the next quarter-century.

According to its Company Profile, the Cultural Heritage Alliance (CHA) entered the industry in 1969:

CHA's founder, a high school foreign language teacher, participated in an educational tour organized by one of the travel companies working with student groups at that time . . . he returned from this trip . . . and launched The Italian Latin Studies Society Cultural Heritage Alliance . . . [later] renamed CHA. Today, CHA is still owned and managed by the same teacher [Mr. Augustine Falcione] who founded it in 1969 (CHA, 1997, 1).

The year 1970 proved nearly fatal for the fledgling industry, however, when an earlier entrant in the industry,

the World Academy folded and stranded students all over Europe. There was a media field day then, and the word "stranded" entered the industry vocabulary. The World Academy fiasco sent strong tremors throughout the industry for years to come. For a while, there were lots of regulations — for escrow accounts and the like — to make sure that didn't happen again, and the cloud of that event hung over all of us for a long time.

Nonetheless, student travel "caught on" during the 1970s, culminating in 1975. That year saw, in the words of one informant, " a watershed of Biblical proportions" when the ALSG entity

created the 'spring' travel market by offering inexpensive, one-week trips scheduled during Easter school vacation periods. Over 6800 students registered for [these trips with ALSG], breaking the dominance of AIFS within the high school market and ushering in a new era (ALSG, 1989).

Three years later, in 1978, several of ALSG's core executives, led by Michael Eizenberg, bolted the parent company and formed the American Council for International Studies (ACIS). As one informant recalls:

We . . . recognized that the student travel industry was changing in a very fundamental way . . . teachers and their goals were changing too, at the same time, for many reasons . . . it was just the right set of elements converging all at the same time, and we had a handle on that. We thought, "Hey, this is something we can relate to, something we can do well!" So we created ACIS. It's pretty simple . . . we had the opportunity to build a new . . . organization . . . then too, we were just very, very lucky.

This "defection" is described by yet another observer as an "event . . . that shaped the course of the industry for years to come."

Another company, now known as EF Educational Tours, entered the market in 1981. According to its current President, Olle Olsson, EF initially purchased a company called Interstudy, which formed the "nucleus for what today we call EF Educational Tours."

In the early 1980s the industry's expansion continued, notably in the form of American Educational Travel (AET) founded by Desmond Maguire, a former ACIS executive whose career in educational travel had begun at ALSG, and by David Stitt, a former executive at ALSG and co-founder of ACIS. One informant described this event in familial terms: "ACIS itself became a 'parent' company, and ALSG became a 'grandparent.'"

The mid-eighties were said to have been "hugely successful" years for student travel, perhaps influenced by the dollar's strength and "media reports on 'Europe at bargain prices." In fact, by 1985 — described by several informants as a particularly lucrative year — at least one company "thought we had topped out . . . that we had captured the most [of the market] that we could capture." However, the boom was not to last.

With the American bombing of Libya in 1986, following on the heels of the 1985 Rome airport massacre, the student travel industry sustained "enormous" cancellations by students who had pre-paid for tours, raising concerns about "the industry and our [company's] future. We didn't know what would happen in 1987, what would happen to the industry as a whole" (B, 2-14). This event was described by another informant as "the biggest problem I've seen in all the years that I've been involved" (L, 1-10). Most of the cancellations came at a critical time, within 45 days of the summer tours' first departures, and were characterized by hysterical travelers (or more accurately, their parents) demanding that companies provide full refunds for canceled trips. One executive said that parents "seemed to think it was a suicide pact to let their kids travel." The industry limped into the 1987 travel year, to rebound somewhat once it became apparent that no major terrorist incidents had, in fact, marred the 1986 travel season. It was at this time that AIFS, who had "diversified, so they were able to weather the storm in that way" bought ACIS "as a growth company" that subsequently "became the 'student travel division' of AIFS — but we [ACIS] kept our own identity, our own offices, and not much changed." Thus, AIFS ceased to be a nominal member of the industry, even though it actually owned ACIS from this time forward. EF, also diversified, was able to survive 1986, as did CHA and AET.

However, ALSG — the company that had "engendered" several of the industry's other entities — was not so fortunate. Dr. Gilbert Markle, founder and then-CEO of ALSG, explained:

Kaddafi's to blame . . . .In 1986, when the U.S. bombed Tripoli, thousands of students planning to travel that summer to Europe with ALSG canceled at the last minute, producing losses for ALSG in the millions of dollars. So, a year later, the company chose to insure its travelers . . . against any tuition losses due to terrorism cancellations, hoping to restore confidence and business volume. Only, the business didn't recover in 1987 . . . and ALSG was forced to consider the cancellation of its 1987 summer tours altogether.

In the end, ALSG's assets were seized by its insurer and sold at auction in 1991 to an Englishman named Christopher du Mello Kenyon.

Upon leaving ALSG in 1991, Markle founded another student travel company, passports — whose existence put him in the rather unique position of having been his own father, insofar as the "genetics" of the student travel industry are concerned. However, ALSG,

which had been acquired . . . by the Englishman, Christopher Kenyon . . . ceased operations unexpectedly in June of 1993, due to a 'lack of operating funds,' stranding thousands of American travelers in this country and overseas.

Here, it should be noted that Kenyon's ALSG/Milestone (as it was called) had also subsumed AET, which it purchased from founder Desmond Maguire and its other owners in 1991. Thus, both AET and ALSG disappeared from the industry with Kenyon's demise.

Throughout this relatively turbulent era — roughly between the years 1986 and 1995 — other members of today's industry came into existence. Voyageur was founded in 1992 by Paul Colella and Joseph Cancelmo, both former employees of ALSG and later of Kenyon/Milestone. In 1993, the National Educational Travel Council (NETC) was co-founded by Desmond Maguire, a former employee of ALSG and ACIS and president of AET; and by David Stitt, who had also been an executive with all three previous corporate entities. Thus, in terms of industry genealogy, Maguire and Stitt (like Markle before them) became their own fathers; as well, executives at ACIS became "grandfathers," and Markle (albeit not ALSG) became a "great-grandfather" — as it were. Also in 1993, Travel by Design was founded by Elizabeth Lalos, who had worked for both ALSG and ACIS. Finally, Global Vistas was founded in 1995 by James Gibson, who had been employed by both ALSG and passports.

From the informants' individual viewpoints, several minor details regarding this industry's evolution are in some dispute, particularly regarding circumstances surrounding the "births" and "deaths" of current or former member entities. However, the story constructed here is accurate in both its chronology and in its depiction of the details as described by the majority of participants most intimately involved in each event. The industry's "genealogy" is pictured in Appendix E.

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All dissertation material copyright © Linda Gayle Lyle, 1998. All rights reserved.