It was an early afternoon in September when the phones stopped ringing.

An employee of Sunway Travel had shouted out for someone to turn on a radio and in unprecedented silence the staff gathered around to listen to the world change.

Without a television or a phone, the description of one plane and then another flying into two towers across the Atlantic Ocean, was relayed to a small office in Blackrock in south Dublin over a radio on September 11, 2001. 

The front window of the office, facing onto the village main street, were full of familiar advertisements for beach holidays, cruises, and American adventures. Brochures for Turkey, Morocco, Portugal and Spain were strewn across desks.

But foreign holidays lost their allure the moment an aeroplane become a weapon and Sunway was unilaterally placed in a coma. It wouldn’t be fully resuscitated for months. 

It was an unbelievable situation, Tanya Airey, who was chief executive officer of Sunway Travel at the time, told The Currency.

A family-run business, Sunway was founded by Airey’s Grandfather, Roy Beatty, in 1966, the same year she was born.

She joined the business straight out of college and worked in different roles across the company before she taking over from her aunt, Madeleine Kilbride, in 1997. Under her watch, it went from a smallish company, employing 30 people, to the largest tour operator in Ireland. 

Although 9/11 was an unbelievable situation, it wasn’t the first time war and terror intruded on the business.

In 1990, she and her aunt travelled to London for the World Travel Market expo. At the time, the British tended to be more innovative and further advanced in their ideas of what a holiday destination looked like, so it was a hub of ideas. 

What Sunway latched onto at the expo was Morocco. No one in Ireland was doing tours to the North African destination yet, but no holiday makers were saying they wanted to go either. 

Airey decided they could create consumer demand, rather than be led by it.

They put together a package that first year using Royal Air Morocco, and flew a 1,000 Irish people to experience Agadir for the first time. 

“It was the beginning of something exciting,” Airey said. “And then the Gulf War hit. 

“Everyone in Sunway, including my aunt and me, went on a three day week as there was practically nothing to do. People were terrified, it was a really scary time and no one wanted to leave Ireland.”

But the company continued on, determined that Morocco would become a destination and it would be profitable. The only way Sunway could do it though was to take the risk of chartering a flight and create the demand themselves. 

“We called Morocco our missionary work because people would say they’d never want to go there but then you’d tell them the price and their tone changed pretty quickly,” she said.

“Once things cleared up with the Gulf War people were travelling way more than they ever were before.”  

Sunway continued to develop their charter business, introducing the beaches of Sicily and Sardinia to Irish photo albums. 

At the very height of the Celtic Tiger, Sunway had 100,000 plane seats and about half as many hotel beds to sell to Irish customers. 

“It was beyond risky when I think back now. People used to ask me how I slept at night and I think it was just my age and my whole gung ho attitude,” Airey said.

“Which is good and bad. But as you get older you get more risk averse.”

Over the decades a clear pattern has emerged that Airey has had to learn to live by; whenever there is a pull-back in travel after a war, a terrorist attack, a natural disaster, or a pandemic, there is typically a lull and then a strong rebound, as pent-up desire trumps fear.  

“Owning a business, you can’t take any money unless you’re making money”

Tanya Airey

The key lesson, from her perspective, is shore up enough cash, reserves and consumer goodwill, to survive the famine and be around for the feast. 

In the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Sunway saw a slowdown in bookings but things have picked up in recent days.

“The main hit has been to cruises in the Baltic Sea. In fact in some areas we are seeing a surge in bookings, namely America.”

This summer, Sunway still expects to fly around 2,000 people each week, and return to the same capacity it operated at pre-pandemic. 

Pre-pandemic the company’s revenues were €33.12 million, and Airey for the first time in her adult life decided she wanted to know what it was like not to be all-consumed by her job.

*****

In November 2019, she stepped aside from her CEO position to become Executive Chairman and Mary Denton, an industry veteran, took over. The changeover happened just four months before the greatest ever disruption to the travel industry would occur. 

In true CEO style, Airey climbed Kilimanjaro a few weeks after handing over to Denton. Although, the memory is not exactly the makings of an inspirational c-suite LinkedIn post.

“I felt like I was in a prison chain gang on the way up,” She laughs. “It was a so mucky and with the rain and the mist, just awful.

“It wasn’t until the last night when we were eating outside and could see the stars, that I thought yes okay,  this is amazing. But God, I wouldn’t recommend going in November.”

When disaster did strike in March 2020, the former CEO was true to her management style of fairness and empathetic delegation. She didn’t rush back in, but believed Denton when she said she could handle it. 

Sitting in the Fitzpatrick Castle Hotel in Killiney, on a sunny afternoon, with tea and a scone, Airey is relaxed and tanned after a January cruise around Central America. 

Spending an hour with her is easy company, she doesn’t check her phone or a watch, after a lifetime of being tied up in the granular details of her family business, she has the time now to look at it from further afield. 

“When you’re in the job and just fighting fires on a daily basis, it’s hard to see the bigger picture, but when you’re further back from it it’s easier. 

“I never thought I’d be in this situation, I never thought I’d be able to step aside, because I was so involved in the business day to day myself, but Mary was just very happy to take it on and she is amazing

“It’s easier to make decisions because you’re not involved in the day to day. So I can be the bad cop and she can be the good cop in a way.” 

Over the pandemic Sunway reduced its workforce from 70 to 50 people and the business took a substantial loss. Revenues plummeted by 70 per cent, and Sunway Travel Ltd recorded a pre-tax loss of €360,945 in 2020. This followed a pre-tax profit of €254,523 in the prior year.

The directors of the company, Airey, her husband Philip Airey and her cousin Brian McGovern, reduced their pay by 74.5 percent, from €401,685 in 2019 to €102,260. 

“The whole company took pay cuts, so we all took pay cuts too. Owning a business, you can’t take any money unless you’re making money, so you need to keep your balance sheet as strong as possible so that we are around for when things go wrong,” she said.

“You can go through a few years and everything is fabulous and then something like the pandemic hits and if you haven’t got a strong  balance sheet you’re not going to get through it.”

Much of Sunway’s Covid period was taken up by the booking and rebooking of people’s holidays as the pandemic continued and travel restrictions intensified and changed on a weekly basis. 

“We were rebooking and getting no money, we had to employ people to do that, and we ended up putting people on short-time, because we couldn’t afford to pay them full time. Everyone was working their asses off,” she said.

“We have tried to diversify and change and build up the business, we have been hit so many times by many things outside of our control. 

“One of the things that helped us get through the pandemic was we had gotten less and less into charter, by buying from Aer Lingus or Ryanair. 

“We still charter to Lapland or Turkey but if it had been ten years ago, when we were all charter, we would have had huge problems. I can’t even imagine.”

Tanya Airey is managing director of Sunway Travel Group, Pic. Bryan Meade 22/02/2022

Airey’s career has been defined by the big swings she has taken, by the risks, by ambition for growth, and by preparing for the worst when the times are good.

When she took over Sunway in 1998, it was a small travel agency with outlets in Blackrock and Stillorgan. 

Under her stewardship, the locations rose to seven before she decided to sell their bricks and mortar presence entirely, around 15 years ago, to become a completely online and call centre business.

It is now the largest Irish tour operator and offers consumers a choice of over 77 destinations worldwides, including escorted tours, adventures, cruises and honeymoons. 

“We had to decide we were either going to be a chain of travel agencies or we were going to invest in our website and call centre head office and manage it much better from there,” she said.

“What’s happened now is all the travel agencies in Ireland, they deal with us, so we get bookings through them and we don’t have to manage them. They aren’t our shops, so it’s the best of both worlds.” 

Airey estimates around 60 per cent of Sunway’s business now comes from travel agencies around Ireland and the rest is derived from their own website.

In an era of internet domination, where people are accustomed to using their phones for everything from finding love, to buying a house, the threat to travel operators seemed existential at one point. 

But Airey is confident about the future and what Sunway have built is a reputational trust, and decades of specialisation.

As people venture out to travel again they are looking for a safety net if things go wrong, as well things that “cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime,” as Mark Twain phrased it in his book Innocents Abroad.

When the Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted in southern Iceland in April 2010, creating an ash cloud that travelled across the North Atlantic Ocean to Northern Europe, air travel was grounded for days. 

“The Icelandic volcano was horrendous, we were lucky it was April and we didn’t have a huge amount of people away but we still had something like 2,000 people abroad,” she said.

“We didn’t know how long it was going to last and we had to look after their meals and accommodation for about two weeks and we really started to think how long we can do this, with 2,000 people. But we managed and we got through it.’

Safety and a voice on the other end of the phone is still something tour operators can provide that booking independently can not. 

Over the years Sunway Travel Group has bought up seven different companies, including O’Mara Travel, the general sales agent for Club Med worldwide holidays and rivercruise specialists for holidays in Europe and Russia,  Omni Tours and Wings Abroad’s Turkish holiday programme. 

It has purposefully diversified across specialities and countries so that it is not exposed when one area goes out of fashion, or when there is a volcano. 

“There’s not many companies that have all we have, and are experts in the field of transatlantic, weekends, cruises etc.”

Few family businesses make it to the third generation and only a small percentage make it past the fourth. Airey is the third generation and if Sunway wants to be the exception rather than the rule, she has to hand over a business that is healthy rather than weighted by the past. 

She has had to be pragmatic in shedding parts of the business that are no longer functioning as intended.

“When my grandfather started it and when I joined, we did a huge amount of corporate travel. The name Sunway didn’t really fit, so we called it Priority Travel, that was based in Stillorgan,” she said.

“We built up our corporate business, and to be honest I enjoyed being on the road, getting accounts and you really get a buzz out of it, but it kind of wore off for me.

“So we sold it to American Express, and then we decided we were really going to focus on leisure travel.”

Airey felt the same drive for change, when Sunway decided to get out of the bricks and mortar business, while there was sentimental attachment to the Blackrock shop where she had grown up with her grandfather at the helm and was given jobs to do like putting stickers on brochures as a child – when the time to let it all go came, she did so before it was too late.

The issue of succession is one she claims she hasn’t thought about much, other than to reason it would be better to transfer the business sooner rather than leave it too late. 

A mother of three, one of her children, Jamie Airey, has recently joined Sunway. He studied product design and medical device design before joining Sunway’s sales and marketing department.

“Over the years we were approached a lot with buyout offers, but we have a fantastic management team and Jamie is there now, and he is going to hopefully make a go of it at some stage down the road, he hasn’t been there long enough yet, but one day.”