A Remade Mayflower

PHOTO: Tours to destinations such as Venice, Italy, remain popular.

John Stachnik was a young upstart with a lot of confidence in himself when he graduated college in the mid-1960s with a degree in journalism and advertising. He had a lot of aptitude, drive, intelligence and persistence. Only one problem, he didn’t know what he wanted to do.

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Stachnik went to a career counselor and was told bluntly, “You cannot be involved in anything that smacks of reality. You could be happy in the sporting goods business or something like travel, but not something that makes trains or cars.”

Now looking back over the 35-year history of Mayflower Tours, the company he founded, he reflects that the career counselor earned his money that day.

“Looking back on it, I guess it was the best money I ever spent,” said Stachnik, “It had never crossed my mind before. I needed someone to articulate it. When I thought about it, it seemed like they were right. When I was writing for the Marquette Tribune, I covered sports.”

Out of college, Stachnik had landed a good job in the ad department of the company that manufactured the Skilsaw. He was succeeding, getting promoted. But his heart was not in it.

“I realized, I can’t do this for 40 years,” said Stachnik. “There was a need for it, but it wasn’t for me. It’s not my kind of sell. I realized that the difference for me was whether it was an emotional or intellectual sell. If I tried to make a pitch for Skilsaws it would be all numbers and specifications. But in travel you can appeal to people’s emotions.”

Bingo. The career counselor had been onto something. Stachnik took the counselor’s advice and went in search of a job in the travel industry. He started putting out queries and landed a job with the Washington Hotel Company in Washington, D.C. He moved to D.C. and became an assistant to the president. In that capacity he got his fingers into every aspect of the operation: advertising, sales and marketing. He wrote the prospectus for the building of a new hotel. He wrote a feasibility study to raise money.

It was a great training ground. In that position he discovered his own propensities for running a business. He also began to learn the inside story of how the travel industry worked. He discovered it was not just about hotels and airlines.

In his work as a hotelier, he attended the convention of National Tour Brokers Association (later renamed the National Tour Association) to sell hotel rooms to tour operators. From that experience, he decided he wanted to become a tour operator. He partnered with a small tour operator in South Bend, Indiana, called Forlow Tours. He worked with his partners for nine years and made another discovery about himself. He needed to be independent. He wanted to run his own company.

“I sold out on Friday and on Monday I started Mayflower Tours,” said Stachnik.

The Better Half

PHOTO: John and Mary Stachnik work together to make Mayflower Tours a success.

Thirty-five years later, Mayflower is an institution of the travel industry and of the American Midwest. Stachnik has been chairman of the National Tour Association (NTA) and has been chairman of the U.S. Tour Operators Association (USTOA) twice. He even received the USTOA Lifetime Achievement Award, an honor given to only a few of the industry’s most enduring contributors.

For more than 35 years, Mayflower has built a fiercely loyal following and continues to expand and innovate almost as though it was still a startup. And in that time John Stachnik learned one more fundamental thing about himself. He did need a partner. It just had to be the right one.

The right partner for him was his wife, Mary, who was with him at every turn from the beginning, stood by him, provided support, counseling, an alternative view to bounce ideas off. And year after year the importance of her role has continued to increase.

John had Mary on hand to take the helm when John was traveling for business, and the couple built a staff that could keep the company operating even when John was not there.

“The year I was president of the NTA, I was gone 180 days,” said Stachnik. “A lot of companies are not built to survive that. Today, we have smartphones and Internet cafes, but then if you had to call the office from Jasper, Wyo., you had to pull over and find some change. Of course my wife, Mary, also made that possible. It didn’t hurt that the co-owner of the company was there.”

When John Stachnik made the decision to start Mayflower Tours, Mary’s work as a real estate sales agent provided a solid second income to provide a foundation while the new business was getting on its feet.

When John asked Mary to join Mayflower, she resisted at first. But he overcame her resistance and when she came on board, her experience in real estate sales and her focused, determined personality proved priceless assets to the young company.

Mary took on the task of putting together the sales department, and she did it based on her experience in real estate, a more proactive approach than was typical in the travel industry at the time.

With her tenacity, attention to detail, Mary proved the perfect complement to John. As senior vice president and co-owner, Mary is clearly an equal partner of a dynamic duo.

Marking 35 Years

PHOTO: Mayflower showcases destinations such as national parks with new images on its website.

For 35 years Mayflower has continued to grow and expand, building on its Midwestern base from an operator of domestic tours to an operator of international land tours, river cruises, rail programs and even some ocean cruises. The company’s loyal clientele will follow Mayflower anywhere. River cruises? Cuba? Zimbabwe? If Mayflower offers it, it must be good, they believe. They trust Mayflower, and Mayflower is careful not to disappoint them.

In 2014, for the first time, the company brought in more revenue from its international sales than from domestic sales. “Twenty-fourteen was the first year when international sales exceeded domestic sales,” said Stachnik. “The number of people still skews to the domestic side. But the international side is higher priced.”

To commemorate its 35th anniversary, Mayflower introduced a new logo and tagline and a flashier and more interactive website.

Mayflower updated its logo to a cleaner sans-serif font, tilted to the right to indicate forward motion, placed under a world map and followed by a tagline: “Life-Enriching Experiences.”

“When we first started looking at rebranding, we realized that we always talked about life-enriching experiences but we never put it in the logo,” said Stachnik. “That was the number-one thing we wanted to have happen in changing the logo. There was nothing wrong with our previous logo, but this is a different age and a different era.”

Mayflower’s new, showier website leads with a series of photographs portraying the company’s travel regions, including North America, Central and South America, Europe, Africa and the Middle East, Australia, New Zealand and Asia.

But there are some things the company has not changed, the foremost of those is the word “tours”. While most tour operators have abandoned the word in the belief that consumer don’t respond well to the word, Mayflower stands staunchly by it.

“Nearly all of our competitors and friends in the tour industry were walking away from that word,” said Stachnik. “But I’ll shout it from the rooftops. That’s what we do. We just thought it’s time to be a little contrarian. So that was our decision.”

And though Mayflower has greatly expanded its selection of destinations and its various modes of travel, it stays true to the original principles that have built the company for more than three decades.

“We’re Midwestern, apple pie and the flag,” said Mary Stachnik. “We believe in all of that, handholding, treating people and no surprises, and being up front, assigning the cabins so that the whole group is on one level and pays the same price, and all the user-friendly things.”

But on top of that foundation, much has changed. “We used to talk about ‘attractions’ and now they’re experiences,” said Mary. “You talk about ‘clients,’ and for us they’re the ‘traveler.’ We’re getting more life-enriching, more touchy-feely, things that John and I have believed in and done for 35 years. We’re out there more inspecting things. We hadn’t done that for a while. Most of our travelers are our demographic so it’s kind of an easy thing for us.”

Last summer, Mayflower introduced its first people-to-people trips to Cuba. It was one of its best new product introductions in 35 years. Mayflower’s customers are “fantastically excited about it,” said Stachnik. “I have not presented something in a long, long time where people literally jumped and said, ‘I gotta have that thing.’”

In December, President Obama announced that he was restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba, which will open up the market to many more possibilities. Looks like Mayflower is on the right side of history yet again.