After more than 60 years as a travel agent, Ed Stahl still walks the talk. Stahl, 92, who opened Travel Advisors of Los Gatos in 1961, recently became the oldest person to visit the North Pole, earning recognition from the Guinness Book of World Records for his trip.
Being ready for new adventures has helped Stahl stay in business over the years, even as the internet threatened to make travel agencies obsolete and the pandemic shut down the industry for months. Travel Advisors has had the same storefront at 56 N. Santa Cruz Ave. since it opened, and Stahl has no plans to close up shop anytime soon.
“I like it here, I enjoy it here, and I’ll be here until something radical happens,” Stahl said.
Some would argue that COVID-19 led to radical changes in the travel industry. Dorothy Burke, a travel agent who has been with Travel Advisors for over 20 years, said when the pandemic first hit in 2020, the office was inundated with cancellations for trips they had booked for customers that year. Even now, she added, agents are still working on helping their customers get refunds for trips cancelled due to COVID-19.
But as the pandemic progressed, Burke said, customers were coming to them for assistance in navigating complicated travel restrictions, from passports to visas to vaccine requirements. The agency handled it all, she added, along with an uptick in requests for domestic travel by those not interested in dealing with these restrictions.
“I mean, even when things got better, it was just a hassle to fly anywhere internationally,” she said.
Though the internet has made it easier for people to book travel plans without the help of an agent, Travel Advisors has maintained its client base as most of their customers align with the demographics of Los Gatos itself, agent Mike Egleston said. Many of their repeat customers are older adults or busy working professionals who don’t have time to make their own travel plans.
“It’s easy enough to find something that you can book, but you don’t know who to trust,” Egleston said.
To that end, Travel Advisors has built relationships with other organizations in the industry that have helped the agency weather the changing landscape.
Looking ahead, the agency has been thinking about how the impact of artificial intelligence on the travel industry.
“When different things come out, we’re in a hotbed of where they come out, generally, first,” Stahl said. “And so it takes definitely a while to even understand them ourselves,”
