THE FRIDAY INTERVIEW: Darryl Ismail. Chase Travel International Founder and chief executive.
DARRYL ISMAIL, winner of the 2009 Permanent TSB Ethnic Entrepreneur of the Year prize, knows how to market himself. His business, travel wholesaler Chase Travel International, which employs 65 people in Malahide, Co Dublin, wouldn’t be here if he didn’t. He had moved to London (from Brazil) to look for his first job – never an easy thing to do. At the time, the mid-1980s, the economy was “pretty poor”. Friends were frantically posting off CVs with no response.
“So I put an advert in the papers: I think it said ‘mature and enthusiastic 20-year-old with a degree in marketing and economics, three languages and computer skills seeks suitable employment’. I got a lot of responses and I was able to pick the job.”
That story could prompt a rush on the classifieds from today’s unemployed graduates, I suggest. Ismail smiles: “Yes, well I had a degree in marketing. I thought ‘if I can’t market myself, I can’t market the product’.”
In 1990, the Brazilian-Irish marketer eventually finished his job at the then recession-struck hotel chain Sarova and came to Ireland to go it alone. So he remembers the last time it was impossible for fledgling, would-be entrepreneurs to get a whiff of credit from the banks. “The perception was, if you want to start a business, you must be unemployable, he says.
The trade-only accommodation seller that is Chase Travel, based in the Northern Cross industrial estate since 2005, started life with just Ismail, his savings of IR£3,000, a computer, a phone and – this being 1990 – a fax machine. “We did everything out of our resources. In hindsight, it was a good way to do it.”
But his initial capital didn’t stretch very far: “By the time, you had paid your rent and bought some furniture, there wasn’t much left,” he says. Ismail used his contacts back in Sarova (which is big in Africa), negotiating lengthy nine-month credit terms as he sold on rooms in their then six-strong chain to Irish travel agents. Chase evolved and was “trusted more and more”.
As the wholesaler could drive high volumes of business to the hotels, they secured and sold on rates that were as much as 75 per cent lower than the rack rate (the off-the-street price).
The travel industry had a very different shape back in those pre-internet, pre-tiger days. It was, shall we say, a lot less diverse. Travel agents flogged the same small batch of hotels to anyone who could afford anything as luxurious as a foreign holiday that didn’t involve a French campsite. There was a reason you were always bumping into your neighbours abroad: the travel agent “product” was, by the standards of today, somewhat limited.
Travel wholesalers were also few and far between, with just a handful of big players in markets like the US and Britain. In Ireland, the package holiday was king.
Ismail exploited the gap in the market for something more exotic: safaris in Kenya; tailor-made trips to New York; holidays where you didn’t have to stay either seven days or 14 days, but could choose any length you wanted; destinations like the Seychelles and Mauritius that, up to then, had only been available through the UK market in what were nasty sterling prices.
Airline employees who possessed free or heavily discounted flights were early targets for the burgeoning non-packaged holiday trade. After a “tough” first two years, the business started to enjoy steady growth. The tiger economy kicked in and suddenly, if your honeymoon wasn’t in Mauritius, it wasn’t a proper wedding.
Having started out in business debt-free, Ismail remained relatively cautious, however. “As a business, we always had a conservative approach to things. I felt sometimes that we were too conservative, but I had the principle that, if we did something and it didn’t work, we could walk away from it, and that it wouldn’t do us any lasting damage,” he says.
Ismail, who is a former finalist in the Ernst Young Entrepreneur of the Year awards, waited until 2001 before embracing the internet. Up to then, he didn’t see the point in having one of those “static web pages” that other companies had. Then he saw a viable online booking engine at an international trade fair that he knew would transform the industry, partly because wholesalers could use it to pass on hotel discounts in real time, giving accommodation-only a potential price edge over packages.
He spent eight months building the Chase engine, working seven-day weeks (he admits he has always struggled with his work-life balance), only to complete it on September 9th, 2001.
Two days later, there was a torrent of cancellations. No one wanted to go to the US in the wake of the terrorist attacks and with flights grounded, they couldn’t get to those luxury hotels they had booked through Chase, via their travel agent, anyway.
The gloss faded from Chase’s freshly printed flyers. But it was no time to be defeatist, it was time to channel Chase’s “big push” in another direction: Europe. “We renegotiated a lot of really good deals around Europe and undercut our market rivals and, within two months, we were able to recover the business we had lost,” says Ismail.
In 2005, Chase started its international expansion, opening offices in Spain and Italy, meaning it was no longer dependent on Irish people having cash to burn. It now sells to travel agents in seven countries and has agreements with 45,000 hotels.
With fast-growing numbers of its nationals taking overseas holidays, markets such as Malaysia and the Middle East have the best growth potential, he says.
In the year to April 2008, the company turned an operating profit of almost €900,000, an increase of around €180,000 on the 12 months to April 2007, while, in its last financial year, the company was also profitable. Chase’s international spread means it is not as exposed to either local downturns or seasonal fluctuations in trade, while for hotels, it means they’re a good bet for filling rooms during the shoulder seasons. “Nowhere is really booming in the sense that it’s a global credit crunch,” he says, but he’s not especially fazed by it.
He has lived through really extreme economic conditions in his time. Growing up in Brazil, he experienced the bizarre spectre of hyperinflation.
“You would go to the shop and everything would be 20-30 per cent more expensive the following week. It was spiralling out of control and they used to devalue the currency all the time: 10 became 100, then 1,000, 10,000. Then they would take a few zeroes off the back and rename the currency.”
The travel industry is slightly more stable than the Brazilian currency of the 1980s, although sometimes it must not feel like it.
“In our business, every year there’s something,” he says. “This year it’s a global credit crunch, before it was mad cow or 9/11 or some guy decides to shoot somebody or war breaks out. There’s always some challenge.”
ON THE RECORD:
Name:Darryl Ismail
Age:43
Position:Founder and chief executive, Chase Travel International
Why he is in the news:Ismail has won the third annual Ethnic Entrepreneur of the Year prize.
Background:He has an Irish mother and a Brazilian father and grew up in Brazil, where his father was a university lecturer, while keeping in touch with his family in Ireland. He speaks Portuguese, Spanish and English.
Interests:Sailing, history – especially the hidden history of Dublin.
