BUSINESS
Celebrating Anniversaries , from Reno to Juneau
BY ROLAND NEAVE , CTP
Roland Neave
TOURS CELEBRATING your company ’ s anniversary are an excellent way to market your business , promote your many years of service and reward longtime customers . Every company with longevity should do this .
I started Wells Gray Tours in 1972 , and our 45th anniversary will be celebrated this year with nearly 700 customers on an Alaska cruise with Norwegian Cruise Line in May . We have offered an anniversary tour since 1982 and have found them to be extremely successful and profitable .
I got into the travel business when I was a 20-year-old education and geography student at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia . BC Hydro , the provincial power utility , planned to build seven dams on the Clearwater River in a wilderness area near Kamloops called Wells Gray Provincial Park . An environmental
group decided that , instead of lying down in front of bulldozers , they would run bus tours to the park and show people the beautiful vistas that would be destroyed by the dams and reservoirs . I joined as a guide and spent a wonderful summer taking passengers to the park .
Neave titles this photo from a 1977 tour to Death Valley , “ What a place to take a bathroom break .”
Visitors to Wells Gray Provincial Park look into Third Canyon during a 1972 tour with the author .
When we got word that BC Hydro had cancelled the dams and Wells Gray Park had been saved , we hoped it was due to our modest efforts , although other dams had just been completed and the province probably didn ’ t need the power .
During the next three years , I spent my summers with fellow geography students running the tours with the help of grants from the Canadian government . We called ourselves Wells Gray Park Bus Tours , as that was the only place we went .
I graduated in 1975 and , to my shock , nobody rushed forward to offer me a job in either teaching or geography . That ’ s when Wells Gray Tours got its streamlined name and became a business . I decided to try a longer tour to California — down the Oregon Coast and through the redwoods to San Francisco , Yosemite Valley , Death Valley , Reno , Lassen Volcanic National Park and home to British Columbia . We did that exhausting itinerary in 10 days ; I charged only $ 150 .
There were no schools to teach me how to be a tour operator , so I learned as I went along . I escorted every tour while my father answered the phone and took bookings for the next trip . In 1978 I started running tours to Reno , the closest casino mecca , with an overnight stop in Baker City , Oregon .
When I realized that my hometown of Kamloops could not support a tour company by itself , I opened offices in three nearby cities in the Okanagan Valley . Reno was so popular that we had up to four coaches departing most weekends for eight days . Fares were often as low as $ 99 . On our 10th anniversary , I offered a special promotion for Reno that included a party featuring a magician , The Amazing Elliott . This added about $ 10 to the cost of the tour . Some people grumbled about the
14 April / May 2017