Hank Armand has been making big waves in the travel industry from the moment he dipped his toes in the water. He is one of these individuals who seems to have a natural talent for making businesses thrive regardless of what field they are in, and this was first demonstrated when he started his own first small travel agency more than 30 years ago. He started the business on the back of basically not knowing what to do with his life, but just knowing that he was a keen traveler. At that point he was in his early twenties and he had already done a fair amount of traveling, particularly given the economic and political environment at the time. This was a time when traveling was certainly less common than it is now, and airfares were far more expensive. Also back then, booking and organizing trips was far more complicated and stressful than it is today due to the lack of online options and the lack of travel agencies in general. It was only possible to book a flight through a travel agency at this time, and if the travel agency was not well connected enough then you would have to shop around and find another one. As you can imagine this was quite tedious and time-consuming work, and this was what inspired him to start his very own agency.
He saw that most of the agencies he was dealing with in his own trips were inadequate and difficult to deal with, and he decided he had found a gap in the market to that he would be able to exploit and do a better job than most of his competitors. He proved himself right for the first of many times, as when he started his innovative little agency it quickly became a thriving success and led to him opening a number of other branches. These branches also thrived, and within a few years was a self-made millionaire. As the advent of the Internet came along he could see that this was a potentially huge opportunity for him, and he started many of the first and most successful travel sites that went online. Booking flights from the comfort of your own home is now a total norm, however it certainly was not when the Internet first came along. It is thanks to Hank Armand and a few innovative individuals like him that that this concept has come into the mainstream, and made traveling in general a far less stressful and easier to organize past time.
Hank Armand 