Lives transformed: Port Orchard travel agent starts his own agency during pandemic
Editor’s note: In the new year, the Kitsap Sun is looking at the lives of people who experienced significant unexpected changes as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
PORT ORCHARD – For the last 38 years, Arthur Ferguson has been helping people travel. The longtime Port Orchard travel consultant handled everything for his clients: booking cruises and land tours, securing flights, arranging hotels and rental cars.
Then came the coronavirus pandemic, and in mid-March the entire travel industry ground to a halt. Cruise lines, airlines and hotel chains saw heavy losses as countries enacted travel restrictions and lockdown orders kept people inside.
On March 20, Allure Travel — the Australia-based company that purchased Ferguson’s former employer, Doug Fox Travel – permanently shut down its Tacoma office, where Ferguson has worked since 2015, and laid off all the employees there.
“I was shocked that I got laid off and not furloughed,” Ferguson said. “There was not much I could do. It was like, you know, nobody’s hiring, especially what I do in the business I do because they were all in the same boat.”
In the middle of a global pandemic, Ferguson did the only thing he could think to do: he started his own travel agency.
Ferguson and his husband, Paul Gaudette, decided to open the company in part because Ferguson, at 65, didn’t like his prospects of finding a new career. He’d spent his entire professional life as a travel agent, including more than a decade in Bremerton.
Ferguson and Gaudette, 63, had been planning to retire to Arizona in a few years. At first, they thought the pandemic would wind down within a few months and the small agency would help carry them through to retirement.
“I don’t think anybody knew that much about this COVID-19,” Ferguson said. “It’s been like a day-to-day, this is in the beginning, it was like a day-to-day learning curve for everybody, especially the scientists, and the medical field. So we decided to do our own agency.”
Added Gaudette: “We were thinking by July it’ll all be gone, it’ll be gone by then.”
“And we were wrong,” Ferguson said.
Ferguson’s Travel and Cruise opened July 1 in a 325-square-foot office on the second floor of Towne Square Mall in Port Orchard. The couple’s first round of federal stimulus funds served as seed money for the venture.
Unsurprisingly, business has been slow. Ferguson has booked about 15 trips since he opened, mostly for 2022 and beyond. Six of those bookings had to be canceled after the Centers for Disease Control released new guidelines banning travelers from taking back-to-back cruises.
Before the pandemic, cruises made up a big portion of Ferguson’s business. Travel agents make their money via commission and usually get paid about a month ahead of the cruise date. If someone cancels a booking, the travel agent is responsible for refunding them.
“When you’re giving back $8,000, $20,000, $25,000, you know that’s your revenue that you keep your doors open,” Ferguson said. “And a lot of the agencies, these are the pillars that they’re trying to conquer, and like I said we’re all in the same boat, so all of us are just kind of holding on in the industry.”
Ferguson hasn’t drawn a salary since Ferguson’s Travel and Cruise opened in July – the agency has been able to survive thus far thanks to low overhead and Gaudette’s accounting job with First Lutheran Community Church. The business wasn’t eligible for federal small business loans because it hadn’t been open for a year.
“It’s been tough, and it’s been rough, there’s no doubt about it,” Ferguson said. “But we’re trying our best to keep our foot forward.”
The pair has had to adapt to their new financial situation. Like many families in 2020, Ferguson and Gaudette haven’t been out to eat for a year and didn’t buy Christmas gifts during the holidays. On top of everything, Gaudette suffered a medical emergency in July that required an expensive ambulance trip and a stay in the hospital.
“It’s like pile it on, come on,” Gaudette said. “It’s just been a whole retraining on how to keep everything the way it is, but without the money.”
In January, Ferguson officially exhausted his savings and unemployment. He plans to reassess the travel agency in July, but how quickly the business can get back on its feet depends on myriad of factors, including the COVID-19 vaccine rollout and CDC guidelines that govern the cruise industry.
In November, the CDC replaced its “no-sail order,” which had been in place since March, with a “conditional sailing order,” that laid out a phased plan for returning to service. The cruise industry still decided to voluntarily suspend all sailings in U.S. waters through the end of 2020 while it figures out how to safely operate again.
Gaudette said the pair plan to push through with the business for as long as they can and hope for a quick vaccine rollout.
“We’re just hoping that when everything is loosened up and freed that everybody’s going to want to go someplace because they’ve been trapped for a year,” Gaudette said.
Despite the challenges, Ferguson said he doesn’t regret opening the travel agency. For one, he was excited to be his own boss.
“I did have a lot of excitement, but then the heartache on this is that the day-to-day messages that I get with, about this pandemic that was just really crippling everything out there,” Ferguson said. “You have no control over it. You know, you just have to go with it. People would call me and say, well, we want to travel. And I’d have to say, Well, you can’t travel this month because I can’t send you on an airplane.”
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