In 1924, Arthur Tauck was fired from his banking job and given one task in order to get it back: invent a new way to manage his responsibilities. Having dropped out of school, Tauck had gone to work for the bank where he nightly transported a dumbwaiter down to the basement with the day’s coin revenue inside. One night after accidentally dropping all the coins, he was let go.
Taking his superior’s order to heart, Tauck went on to create the first aluminum coin tray, the same model we still use today. Following his invention, he began going from bank to bank as a traveling salesman to push his product. It was during this time that Tauck stopped into the Wigwam Restaurant on the Mohawk Trail, east of the Berkshire Mountains for lunch one afternoon. As he looked around at the other diners, he realized most were traveling salesmen like himself.
“He was driving around New England and noticed that there were no customers experiencing what he was experiencing,” said Tauck CEO Dan Mahar. “So he put an ad in the paper for an all-expense paid trip for $69 including seven nights of accommodations and seven nights of meals. Four people responded and he took them with him, and that was the very first tour.” The first trip took place via a rented Studebaker and covered 900 miles of New England. Guests toured the Berkshires, Adirondacks, upstate New York, Vermont and Canada.
Tauck continued to do private tours around New England until 1927 when he opened up his itineraries to Canada and around the middle states. In the 1930s he continued further south, and in 1933 went to the US government and the Interstate Commerce Commission to secure a travel agent broker’s license. His number? #0001, the very first in the industry and the beginning of Tauck Tours.
During World War II, Tauck closed down his business for a bit before reopening in 1958 when he went to the US Supreme Court for the right to charter an aircraft. “Private companies weren’t allowed to charter back then and he won. So all of the sudden he could take his guests from New York to the western regions of the United States or western Florida and Canada, so that was a huge step for the company,” said Mahar. That was also the year Tauck decided to retire. “Arthur Sr. walked into his son’s office one day, dropped the keys on his desk said, ‘I’m going fishing,’ and never returned to the office again for the rest of his life,” remarked Mahar.
Over 90 years later, Tauck has grown into a successful family-owned, luxury tour operator providing guided excursions, small ship cruises, river cruises and family travel opportunities on all seven continents. When Arthur Tauck Jr. took the reins, he expanded the company around the west and added heli-skiing and sailing to its itineraries. Coming onboard in 1996, Dan Mahar was named CEO in 2006 having been with the company for 10 years. Mahar worked within the marketing department then serving as the VP of Sales and Marketing and moving on to found the Tauck Ventures group.
In 2012 Mahar formed a partnership with filmmaker Ken Burns as a part of his new ventures projects to create over 100 original film vignettes and specialized small group tours. “We like to think of ourselves as storytellers, and Ken is a storyteller, maybe one of the best storytellers of America. It’s a great marriage because we both can tell different stories to our customers and they can learn more about their travel.” In the same way, they paired up with the BBC and Planet Earth to discover more about the world’s most unique destinations.
One such Ken Burns-crafted tour—Spirit of the Desert: The National Parks of the Southwest—includes 10 days exploring six national parks, two flightseeing adventures, two nights on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, dawn patrol and sunset scouts and special lectures by local experts. In 2016, it is priced starting at $5,190 a person.
If you ask Mahar how the industry has changed over the years he’ll tell you, “The world is getting smaller,” referring to our opportunities to fly just about anywhere and see anything we desire. He also sees Americans being much more resilient than they were just 10 years ago. “When there is disruption in the world—which is not always just terrorism, it could be natural disasters or political/civil unrest—I think it does not cause Americans to stop traveling,” shared Mahar. “They may avoid a certain location for a period of time, but they keep traveling. I think in ‘96 it was very different. If there was disruption somewhere you’d see a real pause for a period of time, but that’s not the case anymore.”
Although currently not offering their Egypt itinerary at the moment due to conflicts in the Middle East, Mahar sees it as one of the best experiences on offer. “Every day is a ‘wow’ day when you go to Egypt, it’s something you’ve been learning about since you were in third grade, every single day of that itinerary. They’re the most welcoming kind people, but there’s obviously external influences that are impacting it,” exclaimed Mahar. The 14-day Israel and Jordan tour visits Tel Aviv, the Sea of Galilee, Jerusalem, Jordan, Petra and the Dead Sea and is typically priced around $5,790 a person.
Whatever the trip though, Tauck makes it clear that being a family-owned company means everything they do is more personal. “With our name over the door, there’s a personal pride that we have in the experiences we provide for our guests,” shared Mahar. “I think there are a number of timely values that get passed down through the family and are passed down within the company. One of them is to constantly keep moving forward … whether its improving our service, systems, the types of journeys and experiences we provide or the type of travel.”
