Harry Goodman
Founder of Intasun package holidays who relished the high life and had an audience with the Pope
HARRY GOODMAN, who has died aged 79, was a trailblazing travel entrepreneur who fuelled the British appetite for sunshine holidays in Florida.
Goodman was best known for Intasun, the business he founded in the early 1970s to provide packages to European resorts at prices well below scheduled air fares; it grew to be the UK’S second biggest tour operator behind Thomson Holidays, the market leader against which Intasun competed, in Goodman’s words, “like a Jack Russell snapping at a big dog’s heels”.
He went on in 1979 to launch Air Europe, which flew charter flights for Intasun and later ran scheduled European routes from Gatwick. At the same time he saw the opportunity to offer £139-a-week holidays in Miami Beach, using flights provided by Laker Airways – and on the strength of that success, his group, later renamed International Leisure Group (ILG), floated on the stock market in 1981.
A spate of acquisitions followed, including Club 18-30, with its “beach party” packages for singles, and a clutch of London hotels which Goodman refurbished and sold at a healthy profit. But he never developed a comfortable relationship with the City, which was as wary of his playboy lifestyle as his appetite for risk, and in 1987 he took his group private again through a management buy-out.
Expansion continued in Air Europe, where Goodman announced he would double the fleet by buying 30 new Boeing aircraft, and boasted that “we’ll always have more passengers than aircraft seats”. A high point was the launch of scheduled flights to Rome, where Goodman was awarded an audience with Pope John Paul II.
After the demise of British Caledonian in 1988, Air Europe could also claim to be Britain’s second largest scheduled carrier – attracting hostility from British Airways, which briefed investigators to find out whether Goodman was secretly backed by foreign investors, and was believed to have been behind a spate of lurid tabloid stories, including revelations of “wild parties” and a past conviction for possession of cocaine.
It was not Goodman’s personal foibles, however, but the wider impact on tourism of the first Gulf War that brought ILG to grief: it collapsed with £500million of debts in 1991.
Harry Goodman was born in London on November 12 1938. His father died in a car accident before Harry was born; his mother, Rebecca Aaronovich, from a Latvian Jewish immigrant family, then married Charles Goodman, whose name Harry took. But after Rebecca died of cancer and Charles abandoned the family, the 12-year-old Harry went to live with an uncle and aunt while his two younger half-brothers were consigned to an orphanage.
At 15, he left school to work as a claims clerk – until a neighbour offered him a job in a Hatton Garden travel agency, which came as a revelation to “a kid from the East End who’d never been abroad … I was going to airports and visiting Spain, where … you could drink all day and the sun shone.”
After National Service he diverted briefly into running an employment agency in Bond Street, which he likened to “a cattle market”. By his own account, “I sold it two years later and bought three travel agencies from a dentist in south London” – and in 1962 he founded Sunair, marketing holidays to Spain and Italy in what he described as “the beginning of a gold rush”.
After selling Sunair in 1971, he set his mind to creating a new package holiday model in Intasun, which made its breakthrough in 1974 by picking up 50,000 customers from the collapse of the tour operator Clarksons. Likewise in 1982, Goodman stepped in to benefit from the demise of the Laker empire.
If it was true, as one profile reported, that Goodman “loved to shove two fingers at sober-suited City toffs”, it was also the case that bankers who understood his modus operandi grew to like him: one invited him for a day at the Badminton horse trials, where Goodman showed up in a Rollsroyce convertible and a turquoise suit, with a spectacular picnic.
Shortly before the collapse of ILG, Goodman passed out at the wheel and almost died. “I was overweight, stressed and living an unhealthy lifestyle,” he admitted. “I was so busy trying to save my business, I hadn’t noticed.” Four weeks later he was also broke.
But after a period of quiescence which he called his “wilderness years”, he returned in 1997 to launch TV Travel Shop, a shopping channel, which was successfully sold on four years later. Goodman’s last venture, in 2005, was Totally Travel, offering cruise bargains, which ended in liquidation in 2012.
In later life Goodman was philosophical about his career reversals, and most proud of having funded the Rebecca Goodman Centre for deaf and blind children in Walthamstow, in memory of his mother: “That was meaningful. The rest? For Christ’s sake, it’s only business.”
Harry Goodman married first, in 1962, Helen Ross, with whom he had a son and a daughter. Secondly, in 1977, he married Joy Mcgeever, née Rosendale; they had a daughter. He married his third wife Yvonne in 1986; she survives him, with his children.