I caught up with my dear friend PR supremo Aysem Monaco last week for a lunch hosted by Kenyan hotel brand and tourism agency Hemingways.
Such a midday event is rare for me, although when I wrote in previous decades for leisure publications in New York City I seem to remember they were weekly or twice-weekly occurrences.
Maybe I have lost the stamina needed to do that.
Anyway, I have known Monaco for more than a decade since she was at a public-relations firm called Purple.
PR companies in those days always seemed to be named for a color or a fruit, and sometimes both: Crimson Banana PR or Aquamarine Pineapple PR — monikers like that.
She also worked for wonderful hotel firm Langham Hotels.
At the lunch I sat opposite Jeff Mills, who is a freelancer of many years standing, a restaurant critic and a global traveler.
Mills mentioned he had written for Travel Weekly, a forum for travel agents that many years ago split into separately owned and managed European and American entities.
I mentioned one of my first jobs was working for the company that owned the U.S. publication.
That was Reed Elsevier, which became Cahners and then Northstar Travel Media, the guise it was when I left it and that it still is today.
Mills said he worked closely when the two entities were one and its U.S. editor was then Alan Fredericks, who I remember very fondly.
Fredericks died in 2005 and is still missed.
I told Mills of my obsession with the firm’s Official Airline Guide when it was only in print. This publication was founded in 1929. Reed Elsevier merged it with ABC World Airways Guide in 1993, the year I moved to New York City for my 20-year stay there.
Mills shared my passion.
It is an invaluable asset for travel agents but also was priceless to “travel dreamers” such as Mills and I who would wonder how it’d be possible to fly from Maputo, Mozambique, to Mrauk-u, Myanmar or from Puno, Peru, to Poznan, Poland.
What all this conversation really told me was how wonderful, and small, our industry is, even though in so many ways it is the world’s biggest.
Hotel News Now’s founder Jeff Higley, another of my former bosses, now runs hotel-industry conference organizer BHN Group, which was bought not so long ago by Northstar.
BHN was Burba Hotel Network, as OAG was Official Airline Guide and, indeed, HNN’s parent company STR was Smith Travel Research.
It is scary to think that Fredericks has not been with us for almost 20 years.
He was the first editor who took time to help guide me as I wrote about hotels for another travel-agency publication, STAR Service, which came out quarterly, with the full list of hotels we covered and wrote about was updated once every two years on a rolling basis.
Its editor was Steven Gordon, whose line manager for a while, as he was mine, was Arnie Weissmann, who then went on to be the current editor of Travel Weekly (U.S.) and one of the greatest travelers I have met in terms of his breadth of knowledge, understanding and travel longevity.
Gordon and Fredericks used to have long conversations about travel, most of which at the time — I was young, learning, newly arrived from England, undoubtedly wet behind the ears — was well over my head.
Fredericks only pitied me when I exposed my indifference to Broadway musicals.
I carried on those conversations with Gordon and Weissmann when they saw I shared their itchy feet for travel and experience.
Nadine Godwin was the editor between the stints of Fredericks and Weissmann, and she worked at the publication and company for 37 years and traveled extensively, too.
Mills also for a time was the editor of Travel Weekly U.K.
Weissmann gave me a present from a Buenos Aires street market of a key fob that says “Malvinas siempre Argentinas,” or in English, “The Falklands Islands Always Have Been Argentine,” as he thought that would amuse me.
It does. I still have it.
This industry would need a very big hall, and no time cut-off, but the stories it can tell! It never ceases to amaze me, and the continued amazement of these people whenever they travel fulfilled me and sent me on my own journeys.
This is just a little of what has passed in front of me, and all at a lunch with a small handful of people in London.
Despite ours perhaps being a small industry, there still are many of us with a colossal saga ready to be written, or at least reminisced over lunch.
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