When Dick West visited Ecuador for several weeks earlier this year, scouting land destinations to offer as pre-cruise add-ons to his new company’s Galapagos packages, he took a few minutes to stop and smell the roses.
“Ecuador is a major exporter of roses,” West said. “I didn’t know that, so I decided to visit a rose farm while I was traveling around the country. This one has a historic hacienda and is on the site of a former Jesuit mission.”
It’s one of several places he hopes will interest his customers before they set off on their Galapagos cruises.
West, whose family operated the small-ship line Cruise West until its abrupt shutdown and subsequent bankruptcy filing last fall, has formed a company called Explor Tours. He announced the creation of the firm a few months ago and anticipated he’d start selling packages this summer.
So far he’s on track.
“I’m just waiting now for the website [www.explor-tours.com] to be finished, and I hope by the end of July to be taking bookings,” West said.
Planning to eventually charter a set of ships, West said he will launch his operation by selling inventory on small vessels already operating in the Galapagos and provide three add-on tours that he has designed.
One tour spends two nights in Quito and includes tours of the capital city; the second also spends two nights in Quito but takes customers to outlying areas, including the rose farm West visited; and the third is a five-night tour that visits several areas, including Cuenca, a Unesco World Heritage site settled some 400 years ago. The Galapagos Islands and Quito also are Unesco sites.
“I wanted to offer really great itineraries,” West said. “There is so much diversity in Ecuador, and there’s an indigenous population, which is something you don’t find in too many places anymore.”
Explor Tours will sell into five vessels: the 100-passenger Galapagos Explorer 2, owned by Canodros, an Ecuador-based tour firm; the 40-passenger Isabela and the 48-passenger La Pinta, both owned by Metropolitan Touring, a South American company with operations in the Galapagos; and the 40-passenger Eclipse and the 16-passenger Athala, owned by Ocean Adventures, based in Ecuador.
The cruise and land tour packages will range from $4,000 to $7,000 per person, he said, based on itinerary.
When he announced the formation of Explor Tours, West said that clients’ money would be placed in an escrow account until their trips were completed. Since the surprise closure of Cruise West last year, West said he wanted to “remove any image problem” he might have in the industry.
“I don’t know if I do or do not have an image problem, but if anyone pays by cash or check the funds will go into escrow,” West said. “Credit card payments will be processed by the cruise company that owns whichever ship they are booking as part of an Explor Tours package.”
He said he hopes to work with a group of agents that has contacted him about the new venture, and down the road he will establish a network of home-based reservation agents. He also has approached agents who used to sell Cruise West.
“I’ll be taking direct bookings and bookings through agents, and I’ll pay commission,” he said. “I want to find agents who are already selling small-ship cruising and know the advantages of that. I have no resources to do seminars. This is a bootstrap operation. I’m starting all over.”
Dave Randon, owner of Morganville, N.J.-based Travel Patriots, specializes in small-ship cruising and was a self-proclaimed “big fan” of Cruise West.
“It was an excellent cruise line,” Randon said. “I tend to withhold judgment on lines that go out of business. We don’t know the whole story. But it’s absolutely possible that I would book with Dick West again. And I think other agents will, too. Cruise West had a very loyal following of agents.”
Dick West’s credibility, Randon said, might cause some agents to “have secondary thoughts about booking with him, but I think there will be a lot of agents who will have no problem with it at all.”
Randon said he typically does not book Galapagos cruises, but said he’ll be interested to learn more about West’s new venture.
“I remember booking Westours way back when, which Dick’s father started,” Randon said.
West’s father, Chuck West, founded Arctic Alaska Travel Service in Fairbanks in 1946 and Cruise West in the mid-1980s. He also created Westours, Alaska’s first motorcoach operator, and sold it to Holland America Line in the early 1970s. The elder West died in 2005.
Dick West said he will focus on selling seven-day cruises to the Galapagos, despite a new regulation from Galapagos National Park, taking effect in February, that prohibits any ship from landing at the same location more than once every 14 days. The rule currently enables ships to land at the same location once every seven days. It means that some operators are pushing longer itineraries, West said, so that certain locations can be revisited.
But that’s not a big concern to West.
“The new regulations are being [implemented] because some sites are getting overutilized, while others are remote and don’t get as many visitors. But, frankly, every one of the islands is amazing. There are 145 sites available to visit and [most ships] will visit two sites a day, so there’s plenty to see,” he said, adding that the vast majority of visitors “don’t specify to an operator which islands they want to go to, or which wildlife they have to see.”
He said a three- or four-day cruise is too short for the Galapagos.
“I’ve seen people leaving after just three days. … They miss so much,” he said.
So, why the Galapagos this time, rather than a return to Alaska with a new venture?
There are several reasons, West said. There aren’t enough small ships to sell into in Alaska, and the Galapagos is completely unaffected by outside interests.
“You go to Alaska today and you see jewelry stores and other evidence that the big cruise ships have impacted that destination,” he said. “You don’t see that in the Galapagos. Also, the Galapagos is a year-round attraction, and it’s on pretty much everyone’s bucket list.”