Another world - how much the travel industry has changed

When teenager Michael Staunton took a few steps from his own house into the shop next door to help a sick neighbour back in 1961, he couldn’t have known the gesture would change his life.

Michael never intended working in travel and tourism but ended up spending his life in the industry – so much so that his former employers, Fahy Travel of Bridge Street in the city, recently honoured him for his 50-year association with that company.

These days, when a seat on a flight is only a couple of clicks away on the internet, Michael can recall a long-gone era, when air travel was a major undertaking.

In the 1960s, if a person wanted to book a seat with Aer Lingus, which was Ireland’s only airline, they had to contact their local travel agent.

The agent would send Aer Lingus a request – in quadruplicate – by post and wait until for a reply, also by letter. When that arrived, the agent could finally inform the customer if there was a seat on the flight. The nearest Aer Lingus office was in Limerick and making phone calls to anywhere outside Galway involved going through a central telephone exchange – which made the process of booking flights a lot more time consuming.

Those were different times, Michael says, and the story of how he got involved in the travel business shows this clearly.

Michael’s family owned a drapery, Thomas Staunton’s on Bridge Street which was next door to Fahy Travel, one of Galway city’s oldest travel companies.

In November, 1961 Kate Fredrica Fahy, who ran the business, got a heart attack and her grandnephew Sean called on her neighbours for assistance.

Sean was a senior reporter in the Connacht Tribune – he later became editor – and wasn’t able to take over the business.November was quiet in the drapery business, so Michael obliged, going in next door and diverting business to Shannon Travel where Hartman’s Jewellers is now based. He returned to his father’s shop for the busy Christmas season and resumed his Good Samaritan work after that as Miss Fahy was still alive but very ill.

In Fahy’s he would light the fire, sort the post and deal with companies who called. At the time Fahy’s were agents for Aer Lingus, Pan American Airlines, TWA and KLM as well as the Cunard and White Star Liners.

But, there wasn’t a lot happening in the travel business.

“Most of it would have been emigration,” he recalls.

Michael became increasingly interested in travel and says that the companies he was dealing with encouraged him to learn more. So, too, did Seán Fahy and Michael remains grateful for that encouragement. Kate Fahy died in 1962 and the family decided to keep the business open. The shop was renovated and Michael was appointed manager.

“Most of the work at the time was emigration, people going to the States,” he says. Then, as now, going to the US involved a lot of form filling, which a lot of people found stressful, especially those whose first language was Irish.

Michael would take their details and at night, when his day’s work was done, he’d return to his home next door and fill in forms for those emigrating.

He remembers in the early 1960s one woman and her family of 13 children went to America, just leaving their house and closing the door behind them.

A one-way boat ticket to America cost two pounds, 10 shillings or three pounds. Most people opted to travel by liner because they could bring all their belongings. Boats had an unlimited baggage allowance, while the airlines had 66lb allowance for emigrants and 44lb allowance for regular travellers – generous by today’s standards but very restrictive compared to the ocean traveller.

But around this time, employment was beginning to pick up and so, too, was an appetite for foreign holidays. In Dublin, Joe Walsh, who had previously worked for UK travel company Thomas Cook, had set up Joe Walsh Tours in 1961, offering charter flights to Spanish resorts such as Lloret de Mar and Tossa de Mar, around Barcelona. The two men became great friends through working together.

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.