After 25 years running her own travel agency – and more in the tourism industry – Mary McKenna thought she had seen it all. Then came Covid-19. “I am a glass half full person, this will end at some stage, but it’s probably one of the biggest challenges the world has ever seen from a business point of view,” she says. Previous crises did hit travel hard, but never like this. 

“It’s very different. It’s like a tsunami. It’s gone through the world, it’s shocking and it happened so fast,” McKenna reflects. “Okay, September 11 was a shock, but you could see, in a couple of weeks’ time, different things happening in airlines. This has moved at such a pace – really, your hands are tied. I cycled to work a few weeks ago to pick up some checks, and when you see all these shops boarded up, it’s shocking. It’s like a war zone. It’s weird. It’s unreal.”

I spoke with McKenna over a Zoom interview from her home office in the south Dublin suburb of Rathgar. The 55-year-old founder of Tour America and Cruise Holidays, the two main brands of her company Panther Associates, has joined thousands of business owners now largely running their affairs through the videoconferencing app. 

A makeshift sign on the wall behind her advertises the latest brands she has added to her business – Zoom Holidays and Virtual Holidays, a video consultation service with travel agents to help customers plan trips as if they were in one of the company’s offices in Dublin or Cork, closed since St Patrick’s Day. Or, more often in the current climate, to rebook trips originally planned this spring and summer.

To understand how the current lockdown fits in the ups and downs of McKenna’s lifelong career in tourism, we go back to when it all started. 

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The woman behind the Tour America and Cruise Holiday’s twin shopfronts on Dublin’s Abbey St, permanently flashing life-size posters of tropical landscapes and skyscraper skylines at passers-by, was destined for transatlantic travel before she was even born.

“My parents married in the States. They left Ireland in the 1950s on a boat from Cork – my dad was from the North and my mother was from Mayo – and met over there,” she says. They later moved back to Ireland, where her father worked with her uncle in a tour operator specialising in the US. “He used to bring us into the office,” she remembers. “And so we got a work ethic from my dad, definitely an entrepreneurial spirit came there – and interest in travel.” She finished school at 18 and began working with airlines.

At 55, her age today, McKenna’s father died. She then joined the family business, where she worked for six years. At that point, her uncle sold the business to Jetsave, a British travel company organising tours to Florida. I ask her whether she was ever considered to take over, and she replies that her father had no stake in the family company. Her uncle, too, had come back from the US where he had served in the army, and he had four children of his own.

McKenna’s father had developed the support side of the business as an “intrapreneur,” she says. “They were very close, but my father was not a shareholder of that company. So there’s a lesson in that as well.” That experience has stayed with her. In 2016, she bought out travel entrepreneur Liam Lonergan, who had been a “sleeping partner” in Panther Associates, and she says she now owns 100 per cent of the company.

By late of 1995, McKenna had decided to spread her own wings. “I had always thought about starting my own business,” she says. The name Tour America was already in her head. “I had started studying a lot. I had made a lot of contacts.” She says the only thing she didn’t have was funding.

“I had a little office on Eden Quay with second-hand furniture, I took three staff that I worked with in my own company and I gave them £50 a week,” McKenna recalls. They sold packaged holidays to travel agents, who paid in advance and allowed the company to build cash flow. “Someone said to me, you don’t make profits until the first three years. And I said, who made up that rule? So the first year we turned over £3 million, and we made a profit of £69,000. I was terribly proud of that, I thought I was a millionaire. I thought I was so wealthy I could nearly retire.”

McKenna set the company on a growth path and moved to larger premises on Abbey St, working “seven days a week from 8 in the morning til midnight”. She took evening classes, studied accountancy and taught herself by reading books about leadership, emotional intelligence and autobiographies. 

With her hand, she mimes a straight ascending line: “A lot of people think business works like that.” But her hand quickly moves into sharp peaks and troughs. The reality is “ups and downs,” she corrects.

By 2001, Tour America had 43 staff when September 11 struck. “All my business – you’re selling holidays to the States and it went overnight. Overnight,” she says. “I remember maybe three or four weeks later having to let go of 11 staff and meeting them all individually and it was the hardest thing I ever had to do.”

“Our legal responsibility because we’re licensed and bonded means we always have to take care of you as a client, mind you abroad – your money’s always protected.”

In her search to reinvent the company, McKenna began to look into cruises. Special offers were available. She went for it. “I started a company called Cruise Holidays and that was a tremendous success. We took back 10 out of the 11 people straight away and we put them into this new brand,” she says. Cruise Holidays brought in €6 million in its first year, cancelling out the drop in US revenue. 

“And then, lo and behold, a bloody cruise ship sinks.” The Costa Concordia hit rocks off an Italian island on January 13, 2012 with over 4,000 passengers and crew on board, following a navigation error. The disaster left 32 people dead. “There was the cruise business gone for another year,” says McKenna.

The travel industry then enjoyed a few quiet years, bar the odd hurricane – until an Icelandic volcano grounded most European and transatlantic flights at the start of the summer season just 10 years ago. “Picture this: we’re running a travel company, we’re dealing with you as a customer, you are stuck somewhere for two weeks,” McKenna says. “Our legal responsibility because we’re licensed and bonded means we always have to take care of you as a client, mind you abroad – your money’s always protected.”

Unlike airlines, she points out that licenced travel agents and tour operators have obligations such as finding hotels for stranded passengers. These kicked in during the 2010 ash cloud, she says: “We literally had a couple of weeks where no movement went, and we had to take care of customers. That cost us €500,000.”

McKenna has built on this capability to develop the business. Customer care is an area where she proudly lists awards won by her company. The strategy has worked, and the recent economic recovery has been good to her business. Panthera Associates’s latest filed accounts to the end of 2018 show steady turnover of €20 million and net profit of €500,000 over the previous two years. Retained earnings of €2.5 million have resulted in an equivalent amount in McKenna’s shareholder funds. The company had €4.4 million in cash at the end of 2018. Personally, she has continued to educate herself, joining a mentoring programme with Enterprise Ireland and attending IMD business school in Switzerland. “I went to college after all,” she says. “We’ve had the best four or five years.”

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The travel industry in a time of Covid

In early March, McKenna was in Italy, where she confesses to having recorded a social media video on a Friday wondering about all the hype around her concerning a new disease called Covid-19. By that Monday, she was back in the office, taking the video offline and facing the steepest challenge in her career yet.

“It has been shocking, decimating for our industry,” she says. Unlike other businesses such as cafes and restaurants, she says the workload in her company has not decreased: “I can’t stop, I can’t freeze my business because I have customers travelling in three, four, five, six months time that I’ve already serviced and sold a holiday to. I did the overheads six months ago or whenever – so we had those fixed costs – that I now have to mind and take care of.”

Of 50 staff, just over half are still working “flat out” from home. After the first few days working round the clock to bring travelling customers home as the door was closing on US borders, they moved on to rearranging upcoming trips booked during the peak January and February season. The next deadline was Easter – a big sailing date in the cruise calendar. Over half of this year’s bookings have now moved to 2021. “We have to service customers, with literally no income coming in. I think we got one booking last week,” McKenna says.

The other half of her staff receive a range of welfare payments. Some are on the Wage Subsidy Scheme: “It’s been very, very helpful, but still, there is a cost in salary costs to us,” she says – in addition to other fixed costs such as rent. Others working in marketing have been temporarily laid off, and McKenna says she has tried to work around individual situations. “We had some staff who said, look, I have young children at home, I can’t work, I’ll take the €350 euros. Or, I’m down country, my broadband is very bad, I can’t access work. So we try to accommodate and do different things.”

“My job really is to think about the future. What are the opportunities? How do we survive?”

McKenna describes her early reaction to the pandemic crisis like someone would a period of grief, going through stages of denial, shock and anxiety. “I was like the swan with the legs going crazy into the water and looking very calm because I had to lead my team, and I also had to send out a message, but everything moved to such a pace that it really challenged me personally,” she says. “I’m in control now.”

She has nothing but praise for the measures taken by the Irish government so far. “As someone who has a mother in a home who has Covid-19 and very advanced dementia – I haven’t seen her in seven weeks – I actually care what happens to her. So I do care about life. And even if I didn’t have her there, I would care. I think it’s the right thing to do. Let’s save as many lives.”

Her current work day ends at night and starts at 7am with research to make sense of what’s currently happening around the world. “I look at Bloomberg. I see what’s happening with currencies. I’m watching that the whole time,” she says. Her travel industry information sources include Eoghan Corry, editor of Travel Extra, and Irish Travel Agents’ Association chair Pat Dawson.

She then calls her HR manager to check how staff are doing, now that she doesn’t get a chance to see them in person regularly. They decide what information to share with employees: “We’re doing a lot on what the future is going to be like, what we can do, what we’re doing – worst case, best case, all the different cases,” McKenna says. All this needs to be communicated to the team.

Gauging customers’ mood

Next on her list is the first of three daily calls with the company’s chief operations officer: “Where are the finances? How are we doing?” All these are conducted through video call, a learning curve for McKenna who admits she was never comfortable on the phone before. 

An important morning task is to gauge the customers’ mood from the previous day’s feedback and social media interactions. Every few weeks, she records a Facebook video to update them on how the company is dealing with the current crisis.

“Then my job really is to think about the future. What are the opportunities? How do we survive? I have to look at worst case scenario, best case scenario,” McKenna says. She leans on business networks she has joined over the years. “I wrote to Enterprise Ireland today, I instantly got a message back. That type of support is really important,” she says. She also talks to fellow Entrepreneur of the Year alumni, members of Dublin Chamber, and the business coach and members of the “virtual board” she connected with through The Alternative Board.

From here on, the interview goes into crystal ball gazing mode.

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Mary McKenna (MMcK): The one thing I’ve done is I have run this as a business, not a lifestyle. So the business is set up with retained profits. What do we need to do to continue on? We have a lot of business, as I said, that’s gone into 2021. I don’t see too much travel happening this year, maybe a bit at Christmas. If you’re a customer and you’re going in September, we’re saying: Thomas, do you want to move your booking into 2021? Because the likelihood is, there’s going to be some type of restriction, but I’m not 100 per cent sure on that. That’s the only message we’re saying right now to consumers. From the beginning, I clearly said I didn’t think travel will happen in July and August. We had to make a call on that early, make decisions and give clients an opportunity to move. 

It’s a very different time than ever before. This is a global hit. This is not where there’s going to be one economy doing well and the other not. Holidays will come back, but there is definitely going to be some sort of recession that’s going to go on. The money that the government is giving at the moment has to come back somewhere.

Thomas Hubert (TH): You mentioned retained earnings and you have an option to invest in the business and keep it afloat. What kind of horizon are you looking for? How long can you stay doing one booking a week?

MMcK: You have to be realistic and look at your overheads, there is no doubt about it. If I look at the worst case scenario for 2020, which I have to do as a leader, I say: What do I need to do, what are the losses? It is going to be a loss, that’s a fact, right? There’s no two ways about that. How much of a loss is it going to be? It’s going to be big, and a lot of businesses won’t make it. 

Salary costs are the biggest cost of any business I’m afraid. I’d like to try and keep all my staff and I hope the government will help on that. I think it’s important, but that might not be my call – it might be a call too much. That’s where I’m really hoping that there’ll be a help in costs. 

McKenna on insurance costs

Mention public liability insurance, and Mary McKenna is on the ball. Literally. She says she hasn’t been able to sit on a chair since being run over by a jeep at the back of her office in 2014, and now uses an inflatable gym ball instead. Yet despite being the victim of an accident herself, she says claim inflation has been “ridiculous”. “As someone who’s been knocked down and who’s fallen off walls as a child, we didn’t sue our neighbours,” she says. “You can’t go into a playground now because Dublin City Council is afraid someone’s gonna sue them. That’s how bad things are, and that has to change.” 

McKenna mentions the well-documented five-fold difference between compensation awards for whiplash in Ireland and the UK. “We have no claims against us and our public liability has still gone up 100 per cent. How can a business survive that?” she says. Although she expresses no support for Sinn Féin’s business policies, she is grateful to the party for having highlighted the issue. 

Although this is nothing new, she says action against the claim culture is more urgent than ever as cash-strapped businesses try to emerge from Covid-19 restrictions: “That was an issue for SMEs before this ever happened, for pubs, restaurants, travel companies, anybody else – public liability was not addressed. For a lot of businesses, it won’t make any sense to open their doors until these things are sorted out.”

TH: When you’re briefing yourself in the morning on what’s happening, you have to follow two countries at the same time, how things are evolving here and in the US. Do you see much difference in how things are going to reopen, people’s attitudes on what’s possible and what’s not, and what’s going to be possible sooner or not?

MMcK: I actually think we have a great country and a great government. I do. I think they’ve done all the right things. They had no choice, we had to do that. I think Donald Trump is mad. And you know, you’ve got all different states acting very differently. California is doing all the right things, but you can see the internal disruption going on between the President and the governors of all these states.

Nobody knows if this comes back in a second wave. So we have to do things the right way. I think you can look at some countries that have done it very, very well like New Zealand. Look at the things that other countries have come out and done well and copy them. But you don’t copy Boris Johnson and you don’t copy Donald Trump. I’m really sorry. I feel very strongly about that. Those countries will open up if they do the right thing, but the different states are run very separately. 

Look, it will end, there will be a vaccination, and it’s going to be 2021. Travel will happen, look at that flight – Aer Lingus [passengers complained of crowded conditions on an Aer Lingus flight from Belfast to London on May 4]. I wonder was that people from the South going to London from here, you don’t know. But there was a full flight. And we’re told not to travel. It will happen, and it will change. I don’t know what Dublin Airport security is going to be like to get your baggage through, it might take you four hours, it’s going to be painful. And until a vaccine comes, travel will never be the same again, I think for a couple of years.

TH: How do you prepare for that? Do you think you’ll have to come up with new products and new offerings for people to travel differently? There is a lot of talk of people travelling maybe less long-haul and staying closer in case they get stuck…

MMcK: And that might happen.

TH: Yes. So how would you adapt to people’s attitudes to travel? Do you have any ideas around how you’re going to do that?

MMcK: I probably would have to adapt to that. I do think the Irish will always go to the States. After September 11, people moved in a bigger number than they ever did before – and that was about safety. So I do think the States will always be attractive, and there’s so much to offer there as well. But if I had to look at other markets, I would look at other markets, I’ll do whatever I have to to keep my business going. 

Twenty-five per cent of my business is cruises. They’re in serious trouble at the moment, but that is a tremendous holiday and those ships are a billion dollars to build. So I do see that coming back and I will go on a cruise myself again. I love it. My family loves it. Definitely, early 2021, I’ll be back on a cruise ship because they have done all that stuff. If you’ve ever been on a cruise, the moment you get on, you’re sanitizing your hands, you’re doing different things. They’ve got a battering recently, but they will get that in order because they’re so professionally run. They’ll have screening temperatures taken. So that market I think will grow massively in 2021 to 2022. We’ll look at the trends, look at different things. 

“The multinationals, you don’t have a 100 per cent guarantee they’re going to be there in 10, 20 years. We need the SMEs who employ so many people to exist in this country.”

What I’m really hoping Thomas is, because we’ve done all the right things and serviced our customer – if you look at our Facebook page, and it’s really important vis-a-vis most travel agents, that anybody who’s selling a service allow the reviews to be on Facebook: good, bad, indifferent. Most people who get not good reviews block them. I want you to see what people are saying. We’re transparent. Talk to us, tell us the good, the bad. We put our hands up. 

So I’m really hoping that our brand will represent trust: “This is a good brand, they take care of us.” What will that mean ethically? Will customers book with us because we’re an Irish company, we took care of you, we’re there, we’ve provided a service, we’re transparent? It’s not about a fiver in a difference in price. This is about a brand that represents trust. That’s what I’m really hoping – and our prices are always very good anyway. 

I do see a lot of things are changing, like we’re all shopping locally. All these small shops that weren’t doing well are starting to do well. I’m hoping that will happen in business as well – to Irish businesses. My cousin has a pub in Dún Laoghaire, I said I will be in and I’ll buy six pints for someone. Louis Copeland rang me, he’s a very well known Irish tailor – I said, look, Louis, I know you do men’s suits, but I’m coming in to order a suit off you. Supporting different things like that. 

I really hope that that is what will get behind Irish businesses. We’ll sort out the things that aren’t right, like public liability, we’ll get there and grow business because the SMEs are crucial for the Irish economy.

TH: Do you think the airlines will still be there – the ones you’re used to send your customers to travel on – and they’ll have the same prices? Or do you expect a big rise in airfares after this?

MMcK: I think it’s really important, one, that Ryanair are there. I’m not a huge fan, but I have to give them credit for something: you go back into the 1980s again, you had one airline flying and you went to London for £400. You need competition. So it’s really, really important that the airlines survive this. If you have just a few that survive, then the airfares are going only one way, which will be up, and travel will be expensive. You need competition, as we do in travel agents, you need competition to make sure the pressure is always on. 

I think it’s tough for them. Both Aer Lingus and Ryanair are financially in good shape. They’ve made calls straight away to protect their business, which is pay cuts of 50 per cent and redundancies for staff. They’ve gone and looked at the business and said: we’re going to be here in two years. But if we get a second wave and it goes on for another year, it isn’t possible for them to survive that. I know Ryanair and Aer Lingus have a lot of cash. But when you’re sinking the amount of cash that these companies are sinking, it’s very hard, really tough. I think they are two good airlines, we need them to compete with each other. We need other airlines and there’s some airlines who are getting state funding. If we don’t have those airlines, the prices will go up. 

The only problem, I think, is going to be with all the different security checks. Just remember, the government makes a huge amount of money on every airfare. You can get an airfare to California for €250, but the price to pay is €700 because you’re paying taxes to the States, taxes to the Irish government. But now the costs of implementing all these processes for testing your temperature, checking and security at the airport – somebody’s got to pay for them. So I do see it going up, yes.

TH: You touched on the way you’re going to need help in terms of keeping costs low. There’s been a number of announcements so far. Do you see that being sufficient or is there something specific for your company that is missing at this point?

MMcK: I think the government needs to look at separate industries. I’m different to a coffee shop. I’m different to a pub. First of all, I won’t be able to have my office probably until July. Second of all, I can’t bring my team into the office because I have to separate them. I actually met someone to see if we could put up plastic screens. I probably won’t get revenue that I need to. 

Travel companies, airlines need to be treated slightly differently. We might need help on rent, rates, salary right up to July, or even further. Customers aren’t going to come into a retail shop. Our business has changed, and that’s why we’ve set up Zoom Holidays because we’re now saying: Thomas, you want to go on holidays? We’ll have all the preparation done. We’re putting up images on the Zoom call, videos, your quotation, and you’re interacting just like this. 

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Whatever travel business is there in the future, McKenna will find her way to it. When I tell her that I had to cancel my own American holiday last month and all I could get was an airline voucher, she says: “You should have booked with me.” 

McKenna expects the global airlines refund fiasco to play in favour of licenced travel agents. “There are no laws that are applying at the moment,” she says. “There is a law called the EU 261, which means airlines have to refund you. Every single airline is breaking the rules because those laws were not put in place for the unprecedented times that we’re in now. It looks like the law might change where an airline can give a credit voucher to a consumer. But the consumer will not be happy with that, I’m sure, in most cases.”

Tour America is due to mark 25 years in business this October. If she can ride out this storm, McKenna is looking forward to the next cycle of ups and downs. She says: “I really want our business to be there and celebrate 30 years of business – and it is going to be challenging.”