Usit closure: How a student-run travel firm engineered a social revolution

Ask any former student about their first taste of independent travel and chances are they’ll mention the J1, cramped house-shares and Usit.

The travel firm, which started out 60 years ago, helped to engineer a small-scale social revolution by opening up affordable travel to students for the first time.

Prior to Usit, Irish students were a fairly sheltered group. The only time anyone went abroad was to emigrate. The company helped to change all that.

On Friday evening it announced that it has closed following a tsuanmi of events spurred by the coronavirus pandemic.

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More than 100 jobs have been lost . The company says the outcome for students who booked travel with Usit is “uncertain”.

Shoestring

It marks the end of a business which started out on a shoestring in June 1959. A group of entrepreneurial students at Trinity College and University College Dublin began operating a travel desk to send their colleagues to Britain and France for the summer from as little as £4 and 15 pence.

The business was run for three decades years by Gordon Colleary, a former UCD student known for his dapper dress sense, complete with multi-coloured dickie-bow and tinted glasses.

Margins in the student travel business were always lean there were several grim periods when it all threatened to unravel.

In the early 1970s, the company was charging students £57 for a round-trip to the US which it considered a rock-bottom price.

At the time, Usit was struggling and under pressure to increase fares to keep the business afloat. At the same time, a new company opened in Dublin controlled by businessman Patrick Duignan. He was offering hard-pressed students a £49 round trip to the US.

Colleary was at a loss to understand how he could survive on margins even skimpier than its own.

A few years later, the body of Usit’s once powerful competitor was recovered from the River Thames in London. His hands were tied behind his back.

It later emerged he had been killed because he had run up huge debts and those he owed had finally run out of patience. It was a grim tale but illustrative of the travel trade’s brutal competition

Rapid

In the 1990s, Usit’s rapid growth mirrored the flourishing economy. It expanded rapidly and muscled in on the student travel trade abroad by acquiring rival companies. By the year 2000, the Irish market accounted for just 20 per cent of its turnover.

The Union of Students in Ireland, which owned a large chunk of the firm, still had students on the board, though investors weren't so keen on novices having such sway.

In the end, USI sold its stake in the company for £9 million and invested the windfall in a new headquarters and a portfolio of shares and other investments.

Just as the company explored floating publicly, disaster struck. Its US arm plunged into the red following September 11th. The company ended up going into examinership and some of its subsidiaries were liquidated.

The company survived, though in much smaller form. It traded profitably, for the most part, and continued to arrange for thousands of Irish students to travel to the US on their J1s.

In recent weeks, a series events spurred by the coronavirus pandemic meant the company finally capsized.

The number of students applying for J1 visas had been declining before the coronavirus outbreak.

In 2013, over 8,000 students travelled to the US on the visa, while just over  3,000 applied last year, a drop of about 60 per cent.

But, earlier this month, the US suspended the J1 summer visa programme for some applicants in response to the coronavirus outbreak. A language school which formed part of the businesses also closed recently.

The USI, meanwhile, has advised students who are trying to secure refunds to make contact with Usit’s liquidators or seek advice from the Citizen's Information service.

For former students of a certain age, however, Usit will forever be synonymous with their first heady  taste of foreign travel, culture shock and true independence.