Gloria Bohan is where I would like to be when I reach age 70.
She is the founder and president of a 524-employee travel agency based in Fairfax City, Omega World Travel, which she built with her late husband, Dan.
(Dayna Smith/For The Washington Post) - Bohan built Omega from scratch, starting with a small office in Fredericksburg. It now bills more than $1 billion in travel and has offices from London to its headquarters in Fairfax.
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I’m writing about her because I just passed my 57th birthday, and as I think about a path forward, I was energized by Bohan, her engagement with her surroundings, pride in the company she created and her continued appetite for work.
Bohan sat next to me last week at the Washington Nationals game (my seats), poking her iPhone as she answered e-mails between reminiscences about her childhood in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where she developed a romantic fascination with the cruise ships steaming through New York Harbor.
Omega World Travel — which she built through scrappy persistence — is nicely profitable, allowing her a comfortable life in leafy McLean and a place in New York’s Hamptons.
Omega bills more than $1 billion in trips a year and produces revenue in excess of $50 million. The net profit margin is low in the travel agency business, so Omega likely nets in the single-digit millions. Bohan, who has turned down offers to buy the privately held company, would neither confirm nor deny those profit estimates.
The business is not without its challenges. Bohan has had to diversify into new lines of business such as cruises and conferences as her agency fends off online competition from the likes of Orbitz, Expedia and Travelocity. She faces new challenges in mobile technology and government pullbacks.
Bohan, who co-founded a space-travel company called Space Adventures, is one of those people who grew up wanting to get out in the world. For her, that meant leaving Brooklyn for Manhattan, where she saw opportunity. After attending Marymount Manhattan College, she taught high school English.
She got a taste early on for the travel business when she organized her wedding reception, held on a snowy December day in New York aboard the Queen Elizabeth II.
“I did the reception for under $1,000,” Bohan said.
She was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug after she and her husband settled in Dan’s bachelor pad in Washington, where he pondered a post-Air Force career in real estate while taking business courses at George Washington University.
Gloria, meanwhile, had been studying the New York Times Travel section with an eye toward a start-up. While teaching, she spent $300 on a correspondence course from the American Society of Travel Agents in Alexandria.
The company became reality in September 1972. She and Dan had moved to Fredericksburg, where he had taken a job in real estate, and there she formed Omega World Travel.
She launched the business in a 400-square-foot space in an old house in Fredericksburg. She chose the name Omega hoping that the similarly named wristwatch brand would bring some cachet (“Who would want Bohan World Travel? And what if I got a divorce?”).
Bohan started small. She wrote letters to airlines and cruise lines announcing she was setting up an office. She applied to the Airlines Reporting Corp. so she could print and sell plane tickets.
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