In the summer of 1993, I walked into the offices of TravelAge
magazine in New York for the first time.
Our company was acquiring the publication, and I was meeting its
editors and reporters.
One of them was David Vis, a young journalist who had just
joined the magazine. Within a few months, we had relocated
TravelAge to our headquarters across the Hudson River in Secaucus,
N.J., and David was here working with us.
Before long, the technology editor's job at Travel Weekly opened
up, and David moved into it. That turned out to be the beginning of
what has become an international career in travel technology.
Early on, David and a colleague, Orest Kinasevych, unwilling to
wait for our company to develop a Web site, went off on nights and
weekends and did it themselves.
They created an index of every travel site they could find,
categorized and annotated them and set up links to find them
easily. David's job was to identify the sites and write pithy
reviews of them. They were classic little descriptions that either
encouraged you to visit a site or suggested you didn't.
Soon after, our first Web site sprang to life using David and
Orest's work as its basis, and David's career in technology moved
from journalist to Internet developer for our company.
But the Web was taking off and soon so was he.
Amadeus Global Travel Distribution beckoned, and David, who is
of Dutch national origin, moved to Europe to work out of Madrid for
that company.
He later moved to Nice, France, started a firm called Infocandy.com and worked
for PhoCusWright, the Internet research and consulting firm.
The other day, I was browsing through PhoCusWright's Webtravelnews.com, a rich source of Internet travel
information, and found an article from early July announcing that
David had joined LastMinuteTravel.com as managing director for Europe,
Asia Pacific and the Middle East.
LastMinuteTravel.com was founded by David Miranda, a former
Holiday Inns executive, to provide access to continually updated
travel and entertainment offers.
The headline on the Webtravelnews.com piece described David as
an "Internet travel pioneer," and in the story Miranda calls him
"an international Internet intelligence pioneer."
As I read the piece, my mind flashed back to what seemed like
not so long ago when David would walk into this office with his
latest ideas about what we should do on the Web.
He taught me a lot about Internet matters when I barely knew how
to make a mouse click.
I'm impressed by how David's career has evolved, and I'm proud
that he spent the early part of it with us.