ALL ABROAD - A MEMOIR OF TRAVEL AND OBSESSION

GEOFFREY WEILL

At the age of 71, British born NYC immigrant Geoffrey Weill knows all too well what he wants out of life. It all started when he was a bright-eyed youngster, and the allure of travel making its way into his existence.

“I had come to New York on a special visa for intercompany transfers, yet my mindset was one of immigration. I arrived with seventeen suitcases on a freezing January 30 aboard the SS Canberra, the only liner crossing the Atlantic in the dead of that winter. In that 1973 cusp that was distinguishing the travel styles of the fifties from that of the eighties, the Queen Elizabeth 2 and her colleagues were already spending their winters cruising the Caribbean or the world. The crossing took a week; the weather was foul. I occupied a woodpaneled cabin that sat far enough above the waterline to be luxurious and near enough to the waves to be exciting, and it was divine.”

Working at Thomas Cook in NYC paved the way for Geoffrey to start his eponymous firm Geoffrey Weill Associates in 1995, where a team of two has grown to a staff compliment of 15, and from three clients to close to thirty. He summarizes it unabashedly “mostly, it was simply because since the age of six I had been strangely obsessed with the reading of timetables, hotel directories, travel guides, and atlases. I knew my stuff. The near divinity of the symbol for a five-star hotel became imbedded in my psyche as I absorbed my father’s simple credo that however magnificent or tawdry a hotel was, he would not stay in it unless he were guaranteed a private bathroom—in itself a rich illustration of the times.”

https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/5781.htm