Last week, nearly 40 years after John and Mary Stachnik
founded Mayflower Tours, the couple sold their company to the Scenic Group and
retired.
"There never really was a formal 'for sale' sign out,"
John Stachnik said. "We didn't advertise it. But very frequently we would
be asked by people if there was interest" in selling.
The Stachniks said the sale to Scenic grew out of a
several-year relationship Mayflower Tours had with Scenic, selling river
cruises.
The Stachniks founded Mayflower as a domestic tour operation
in 1979, and the company expanded to offer international tours in the late
1980s. Mayflower eventually created a successful group travel department, and
when the company began booking those groups onto river cruises about 10 years
ago, they saw robust growth in their business.
"River cruising is the best thing that's ever happened
to the group," Mary Stachnik told Travel Weekly in 2014.
Mayflower will continue to run as a separate brand,
Mayflower Cruises & Tours, and will continue to be based in Downers Grove,
Ill., just outside Chicago. It will be led by current Mayflower president Nish
Patel.
The purchase price in the deal was not revealed.
The move marks a steady and ongoing expansion for the Scenic
Group, an Australian travel company that began as a tour operator in 1986. It
added Scenic river cruises to its portfolio in 2008 and followed that with the
debut of its four-star river cruise line, Emerald Waterways, in 2013. The
company is also launching two luxury yachts, the Scenic Eclipse this summer and
a sister ship in 2020.
Anna Wolfsteiner, senior vice president of the Scenic Group,
said, "The addition of Mayflower Tours to the Scenic Group adds access to
a litany of land tours for our guests and cruise offerings for Mayflower's
large number of groups. Future synergies and developments are certainly being
considered and will be announced as the details are completed."
As he and his wife move into retirement, John Stachnik said
he still wants to invest time working with the travel industry nonprofit
Tourism Cares. Stachnik was the founding vice chairman of Tourism Cares when it
was formed in 2004 as the combination of two charitable groups, the Travelers
Conservation Foundation and the National Tour Foundation.
The Stachniks, long well-known personalities in the travel
sector, have seen the industry go through a lot of changes. While many of the
destinations that travelers love have remained the same during that time, the
Stachniks said that the way people travel has been the biggest change they've
witnessed during their decades in the business.
"Before, and in the early days of tours, we would
[provide] the lowest [offer] first. Now, the suites sell out first," John
Stachnik said.
Mary Stachnik added: "For me, when I started with
Mayflower, it was blue-haired ladies and buses. You'd go to the travel agency,
and we were the last travel experience they wanted to hear about. It didn't
have any sizzle or pizazz when we started.
For Mary, the biggest change happened when she took her
first river cruise in 2008.
"That was the best thing for the escorted, guided
experience I've ever come across," she said. "It was like an epiphany
for me. I thought, 'Wow! The vessel does the movement. It's the hotel, it's the
meals, it's the fun, and we can put our experience on there. It had me at
hello. I was never the same. I knew, right then and there, that was for
Mayflower Tours."