Former
Airline Exec Starts Upscale Gay Tour Company
Jeffrey
Ward
by Jim Gladstone
In the autumn of 2006, Jeffrey Ward began planning a party
that would change his life. Well, change his life again.
For several years, Ward, who today operates the niche
gay travel company Savvy Navigator (www.savvynavigator.com),
had been dealing with unexpected turbulence.
In the late 90s, Ward was diagnosed
with Crohn’s disease, a potentially life-threatening
immune disorder that affects the gastrointestinal tract.
He’d recently been transferred from Canada, where
he ran co-branded marketing for American Airlines and
Canadian Air, to London for a role as American’s
ambassador to British Airways in the Oneworld Alliance.
It was a position in which, Ward recalls, “I was
literally doing daytrips to Brazil. I’d fly over,
give a presentation, then jump on a plane and come back
to London. There are quite a few major world capitals
that I’ve been to without ever seeing much more
than the airport and a conference room.”
Ward’s flight plans were further
complicated by the fact that, not long before leaving
Canada, he began a relationship that continued to blossom.
He and future husband, television producer Michael Klein,
were regularly jetting back and forth between Europe
and North America to spend a few days together.
The hyperkinetic lifestyle took a toll,
and Ward’s Crohn’s symptoms flared up with
a vengeance. “My physical system was failing,”
he recalls, “and my gastroenterologist in London
told me ‘If you ever want to heal, you have to
get out of the rat race. You can’t go on at this
pace.’”
In June 2000, Ward took a medical leave
of absence. “Right at that time, Michael got a
job offer to be executive producer at the Learning Channel,
with green card sponsorship for his little Canadian
self, so we moved to Washington, D.C.”
Ward eventually took a buyout from American
and started his own small executive coaching business,
Northward Leadership & Development. It seemed like
a logical move, “I’d spent twelve years climbing
the corporate ladder, but really loving my work every
single day. I never understood people who hated going
to work, who felt victimized by their careers or their
jobs. I felt passionate about helping people close the
gap between where they are and where they want to be.”
Which brings us back to that life-changing
party. “Michael was going to turn 40 in April 2007,
and we decided to have a big celebration with about
25 friends and family in Cape Town, South Africa. It’s
a place we love. We’d been there together several
times, including for our honeymoon after getting married
at Toronto City Hall in 2004. We were lucky enough to
have had jobs that gave us lots of opportunities to
travel; very few of our North American friends had been
to South Africa and we were excited to share it. So,
for the back half of 2006 and early 2007, I was planning
away, putting together this wonderful trip for all of
our friends and our parents. I worked with an excellent
company on the ground in Cape Town and did enormous
amounts of research into lodging, dining, and activities.
I planned a side-trip for my in-laws to go on safari
in Botswana. The whole process of putting it together,
working through the logistics, making sure all our guests
would have a great time was invigorating. I remembered,
I frigging love this. I could just do this all the time.”
Ward had been free of serious Crohn’s
flare-ups for years, and he was starting to find a certain
irony in his executive coaching practice, “I was
helping executives and leaders find passion in their
work and meaning in their jobs, and I realized that
I didn’t have enough of that myself anymore. “What
I’d been passionate about my whole life was travel.
As a kid, I was an airline geek who knew all the seating
configurations on all the planes. Growing up, I always
booked my family’s vacations. When I was studying
for my MBA at JL Kellogg at Northwestern, my biggest
procrastination tool was to take the L down to the Chicago
loop and just hang out for hours browsing through travel
books at this store called Savvy Traveler. My graduation
gift to myself in 1989 was a trip on the Trans-Siberian
Railway. It was a summer grad school internship that
led to my career at American Airlines.” There’s
plentiful evidence in his blog posts at www.savvynavigator.com
that Ward has in no way outgrown airline geekdom.
His passion reignited, Ward ended his
husband’s South African birthday extravaganza with
a new beginning for himself. At a debrief following
his meticulously planned group adventure, Ward began
to brainstorm business opportunities with Southern Destinations,
the company he’d used on the ground in Cape Town
to help coordinate guides, lodges, and activity providers
for his clan. “I realized that using my connections,
I could put together Abercrombie & Kent-style itineraries
for about half their price. I started mulling it over
and thought this could be enormously appealing to a
segment of the gay North American audience.”
 In
fall 2008, Savvy Navigator was born, its name, in part,
a tribute to the bookstore where Ward once stoked his
wanderlust. Ward took a whirlwind trip to 20 luxury
hotels and safari lodges that had been pre-screened
by his colleagues at Southern Destinations in order
to cull them down to the fabulous final four that would
make the official Savvy Navigator itinerary. It includes
the Londolozi Founders Camp at the Sabi Sands Game Reserve
in Kruger National Park, where guest luxuriate in five-star
tents between game rides to view elephants, lions, rhinoceroses,
and more.
Also on the itinerary is Kersfontein,
a working sheep and cattle farm that dates back to 1770.
The farm’s eighth-generation owner, Julian Melck,
is a gay man who has converted several outbuildings
into luxurious guest suites, and joins Savvy Navigator
groups over dinner to regale them with stories of South
African farm life, gay life, and national history. The
big sky, dry, shrub-dotted floodplain, and gorgeous
yellow light, combined with Melck’s worldly hospitality,
have made Kersfontein a popular shooting site for international
music videos, television commercials, and magazine photo
layouts.
Kersfontein is exactly the sort of unique
location Ward aims to help his guests discover on Savvy
Navigator tours. “I want going on our trips to
feel like going to the theater,” he explains, “Not
just seeing the play on the stage, but having the curtain
pulled back a little further and getting the chance
to look behind the scenes. It’s spending a little
more time at each stop, getting a bit into the local
groove, and finding your awareness of a destination.”
Ward, whose well-heeled guests tend
to range in age from 35 to 55, notes that just because
one no longer wants to flop in hostels or schlep a backpack
doesn’t mean limiting one’s self to the generic
five-star chic of giant hotels that may feel no different
whether you’re in Brazil or Bombay. “These
are first class trips,” he notes (Savvy Navigator
tours run from $4,000 to $6,000 per person), “but
if you’re paying for me to arrange your vacation,
I want to deliver an experience you probably couldn’t
put together on your own. So many tour companies, gay
and straight, use the same vendors and go to the same
places. Savvy Navigator is not going to take you to
a restaurant where you’ll turn around and see another
group of tourists. I’m taking these trips with
my groups, and they get the kind of inspiring, immersive
vacation that Michael and I like to take ourselves.”
After four successful South Africa trips
over his company’s first two years, Ward is expanding
operations in 2010, adding one journey each to Argentina,
including a stay at a remote winery situated at the
base of the Andes, and Costa Rica. It’s all part
of Ward’s original business plan: “My goal
is to gradually develop tours in about five different
destinations, which will allow me to build my business
with repeat customers who have already had a great experience
on one of our trips. There are guys from a couple of
our South Africa trips who are planning to come to Argentina
with me this year.”
For independent-minded travelers a bit
leery of traveling in a group, Ward stresses that Savvy
Navigator tours are limited to twelve guests. “My
typical guest is a gay man, generally north of 40, traveling
with a couple of friends. It’s about 50/50 singles
and couples, and we try to avoid charging single supplements
whenever we can.”
Ward makes a real effort to support
good group chemistry, even arranging pre-trip conference
calls for guests to meet one another. “I want each
trip to feel like a great dinner party that happens
to last for ten days,” he jokes.
Mark Van Gorder, a Chicago pathologist,
traveled to South Africa with Savvy Navigator last May.
It was his first-ever group travel experience. “I
was a little hesitant. Is everybody going to get along?
Is someone going to be a whiner? Well, it turned out
just fine, and I ended up really happy to have the company.
I travel to European cities on my own all the time,
but South Africa is such a different sort of place that
I’m not sure I would have felt comfortable doing
it myself. Jeff actually arranged a short extension
for me, up to Victoria Falls, and I was alone for that.
The place I stayed, The Islands of Siankaba Lodge, was
remarkable, but I have to admit that even in a five-star
‘hut’ it was bit disconcerting to be alone
at night, in total darkness, with all the sounds of
the wild around me.”
While Ward believes that a small, all-gay
group can foster comfort and camaraderie, he stresses
that, in the same way they avoid glitzy hotel clichés,
they also avoid ditzy gay travel clichés. “There
are other companies out there offering the gay ghetto
experience: gay Mardi Gras in Sydney, or Carnival in
Rio. There’s already plenty of that product out
there for people who want it. In my ten-year relationship
with Michael, we’ve maybe gone out to a gay club
once or twice. When we travel we go to interesting restaurants
and bars, if they’re specifically gay, well great,
but as long as they’re gay-friendly and they’re
great quality, that’s what matters to me.
There’s always some free time on
our tours, and I have great contacts in the local gay
communities where we travel and can always point you
to the popular hangouts, but Savvy Navigator is largely
a non-ghetto experience. On our last trip to South Africa,
I actually don’t think anyone went to a gay bar.”
Clearly, Ward has found a viable niche.
One unexpected revenue stream for Savvy Traveler has
resulted from word-of-mouth. “I was getting calls
from people who heard about their friends’ experiences
on my trips but whose vacation schedules didn’t
allow them to travel when I had a tour going. So I started
offering customized trips for couples, using a lot of
the same locations. Because of my relationships with
these great accommodations and guides who are genuinely
gay-friendly, I’ve been able to arrange amazing
gay honeymoon trips to South Africa. And there are even
some hip straight people who’ve heard about us
and asked me to make plans for them.”
These unanticipated extra bookings have
relieved a bit of the anxiety for the owner of a still
young business in a shaky economy. “When I was
in the airline industry back in the profitable 1990s,
conventional wisdom said that people planned big trips
six months or a year in advance. Well, the booking curve
has shrunk dramatically. My trip last May didn’t
fill up until the end of April. I actually had a couple
call me at the end of July to arrange an elaborate $25,000
trip to start three weeks later! Travelers are looking
at their work schedules and their bank accounts and
making decisions between two months and a few weeks
in advance.”
Which, of course, could work out well
if learning about Savvy Navigator has set your mind
wandering. The South African party that changed Jeffrey
Ward’s life is still going on.
[Published:
December, 2009]
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