TRAVEL INSIDER : A More Tolerant World Sees Boom in Gay Tours : Marketing: New companies catering to homosexual travelers are springing up to cash in on a growing trend.

About eight years ago, a couple of Minneapolis travel professionals named Kevin Mossier and Jack Sroka had what seemed to them a great idea: They’d find a cruise ship, charter it for a week and market the cruise as a vacation getaway exclusively for gay men.

The two called a cruise company and set up a meeting. But when the cruise officials heard the specific nature of the charter group, Sroka recalls, “the smiles froze on their faces. They couldn’t get that meeting over with quick enough.”

Times have changed. Mossier shrugged off that rejection, found a willing cruise company and built RSVP Travel Productions into a profitable Minneapolis enterprise, with seven charter cruises on the company’s 1992 schedule and a big billboard over Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. About 40% of the company’s customers come from Southern California.

Last year the company bought its own ship at a U.S. government auction. And this December, the 100-berth Seaspirit will make its maiden voyage as this country’s first year-round, all-gay cruise ship.

This is no isolated success story. Throughout the travel industry, gay vacationers have become a prime marketing target, and scores of special-interest companies have arisen to serve them. Many, but not all, are gay-owned. (One entrepreneur asked me if he could go off the record, then confessed that he is heterosexual, but couldn’t resist such an attractive market niche.)

The International Gay Travel Assn., a Key West, Fla., networking organization of travel agents and other professionals, was founded in 1983 with about 40 members. Since then, membership has grown to 125 in 1987, 385 in 1990 and about 585 now, said board member Andy Schmiedel. (The group’s May, 1993, convention will be in West Hollywood.)

The enterprises range from luxury cruises to safaris, the destinations from Charleston to Mykonos. And the number of possibilities in between may surprise many travelers. For instance: Every spring, thousands of lesbians converge on Palm Springs in an informal celebration inspired by, but not formally associated with, the Nabisco Dinah Shore LPGA golf tournament there.

“It’s really kind of amazing,” says Marianne Ferrari, a Phoenix-based publisher of guidebooks for gay and lesbian travelers. “We can hardly get over the increases we’ve had in our listings. It’s doubling every year . . . and it’s only in the last five years that it has exploded like that.”

Her Phoenix, Ariz., firm, Ferrari Guidebooks, now publishes four guidebooks aimed primarily at gay and lesbian travelers in the United States, Europe and Canada. The 1991 edition of Ferrari’s $14.95 accommodation guide, “Inn Places,” lists about 1,200 gay and “gay-friendly” hotels and inns worldwide, as well as travel agents and other resources. Next year’s is likely to include 1,400 hotel and inn entries if the current boom continues.

“It’s historic,” asserts Robin Tyler, whose San Fernando Valley-based Robin Tyler Productions stages tours and special events for lesbians and other women. “And this is not just happening. It’s happening as the result of a 25-year-old civil rights movement.”

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Private businesses aren’t the only ones vying for the attention of gay travelers. Earlier this summer, the Netherlands Tourism Bureau opened an international campaign that targets gay travelers and include ads in such prominent U.S. gay publications as The Advocate. (“Sincere greetings,” reads one. “From people who respect your choices.”) The city of Palm Springs’ tourism division in December co-sponsored a familiarization tour for about a dozen writers from gay and lesbian publications nationwide.

“We treat everybody equally, and since we’ve got 25 or 30 hotels in town (serving predominantly gay clienteles), it is a viable, visible portion of our business,” says city tourism office director Murrell Foster. “It’s just another segment of the market.”

Most travel professionals see at least two contributing factors: recession economics and AIDS.

After a history of reluctance to be associated with gay customers or business partners, travel professionals say, many companies in the industry have been swayed by the weak economy and the increasingly obvious purchasing power of gay and lesbians. But the relationships remain delicate. RSVP cruise officials, for instance, note that cruise companies they charter ships from are still reluctant to be publicly linked with a gay company.

Among gay consumers, meanwhile, the advent of AIDS has raised interest in leisure travel.

“A lot of people are traveling because they don’t know what tomorrow’s going to bring,” says Sroka of RSVP cruises. “A lot of people have seen friends die without getting the chance to do the things that they wanted to do with their lives.”

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What does this mean for straight travelers?

Maybe nothing. Many travel professionals say they believe the growth of gay travel will continue largely self-contained--that gay and lesbian travelers, having discovered the advantages of moving in a like-minded group, separated from “the straight world,” may well stick with that habit.

Others say it’s inevitable that gay travel groups will take a higher profile in coming years, sharing cruise ships and resorts, booking small blocks of rooms in large hotels. But that, they continue, doesn’t mean the other travelers will note any big differences.

“People who are used to traveling, particularly upscale travelers, are used to dealing with gay people,” says Wayne Whiston, editor of the gay travel magazine Our World. “Unless somebody’s wearing high heels and a tiara, people aren’t even going to notice it. The stereotypes are breaking down.”

From travel agents to tour operators, travel professionals are jostling to capture shares of the gay market.

Harlan Godes, who founded Firstworld Travel Express in West Los Angeles in 1989, estimates that half a dozen established Los Angeles travel agencies, including his, count heavily on gay clients.

At Our World magazine, a three-year-old publication that bills itself as the nation’s only gay and lesbian travel magazine, advertising director Richard Valdmanis estimates circulation at 17,000 and rising. He also notes that when ads for U.S. accommodations come in, “it’s not exclusively Key West, Provincetown, Palm Springs and San Francisco anymore. . . .Places are opening up in places like Charleston, S.C.”

Those places are often private guest houses--refurbished residences that include five to 15 rooms and cater exclusively to gays. Many gay travelers, Valdmanis says, continue to believe that “you can’t really go to the Holiday Inn and hold hands and kiss by the pool. You’re gonna freak people out.”

Those anxieties may explain why the gay travel boom has gone largely unheard among heterosexual travelers. “If there was no discrimination, we wouldn’t have a business, right?” asks David Nale, a West Hollywood travel wholesaler.

Nale founded his company, Atlantis Events, two years ago. His goal was to charter gay and lesbian resort vacations, taking over mainstream resorts for a week at a time. He now charters several weeks yearly, booking as many as 500 gay travelers into a destination.

“It’s like IBM taking over,” he says, and his arguments are evidently persuasive. Atlantis Events’ Oct. 10-17 package is set at the Club Med in Sonora Bay, Mexico.

Another promoter of self-contained gay or lesbian tours is San Francisco-based Africatours, which early this year announced it was organizing gay safaris built around photography opportunities in Kenya.

“There’s not so much homophobia any more,” says Africatours manager Andy Harris. “Everybody is more accepting of different people’s lifestyles. And you can advertise for these kind of things in the straight press, and not get adverse reactions from people.”

There are no substantial differences between a gay safari and a straight one, Harris says, but there is one awkward detail that would-be travelers should be aware of: Homosexuality is illegal in Kenya, as it is in many countries around the world.

“But they have a live-and-let-live attitude,” Harris assures.

“If gay and lesbian people aren’t going to travel where it’s against the law,” says tour operator Robin Tyler, “we may as well stay at home.”