Travel Agent Offers Years of Experience

You’ve worked hard all your life and are ready to put your savings into a cruise around the world. Now, you walk into a travel agency to meet your agent, and there she is--an 86-year-old woman who doesn’t know how to work the computers.

Time to panic? Hardly. That’s Alice Vail sitting there.

“She’s probably forgotten more travel information than most agents know,” said Sandy Orton, the manager at Wide World Tours in North Hollywood, where Vail comes once a week to book her tours. “She’s very knowledgeable.”

Eight times to the Far East, three times to the Holy Land and twice to Alaska, Vail may be the grandmother of all tour operators.

“It is easier to tell you where I haven’t gone than where I have,” said Vail, a North Hollywood resident who began organizing tours in 1958 when she returned from a trip to Europe and felt she could do a better job of leading a tour herself.

After studying with a Hollywood travel agent, the widowed mother of two built up a loyal clientele that has stayed with her for decades. Vail has acted as tour developer, booking agent and guide for her customers.

“She always made an interesting itinerary,” said Irma Rochford, 81, of Studio City. “She is very young at heart.”

Since Vail became her travel agent in 1977, Rochford has trekked with her on African safaris and cruises down the Jordan River. The two have also flown to Vail’s favorite destination, the Orient, where Vail collects homemade Chinese throw rugs, darts in and out of Bangkok jewelry shops and loves to walk along the Great Wall of China.

In addition to tons of souvenirs and photographs, three decades of travel have netted this golden globe-trotter one golden rule: Don’t be late, because we don’t wait.

“I’ll leave people if they aren’t back at the bus on time,” Vail said sternly. “It’s not fair to make others wait for you. You can catch up.”

Vail also has accumulated more travel tips than you can fit in an overhead compartment. Her favorite is the “Arlington Diet”--a three-day plan, executed before you board the plane, to ward off jet lag.

Fortunately, Vail says, airplane trips have shortened during her tenure as a travel agent. Her first major tour group in 1961 featured 98 women flying for 11 hours aboard a prop plane to Hawaii. In September, she will take a group on the supersonic Concorde to France.

But it may be a few years before there is an airplane fast enough to fly Vail and her group out of the few lands she has never visited--for example, Greenland and Iceland.

“Nobody wants to go there,” Vail said with a smile.