Is Joe Langdell, 89, the nation’s oldest travel agent? He recounts tales from his five-decade career to Juliet Dennis
For most of us, there comes a time to hang up our boots. Not so Joe Langdell of Lancing Travel in Sussex, who at almost 90 is thought to be the UK’s oldest working travel agent.
Despite turning 89 this weekend, Joe still works six days a week at Lancing’s only travel agency, and wouldn’t have life any other way.
“I’ll work here until I keel over. I lap it up,” laughs Joe, who’s been in the travel industry since 1960. “I wake up every morning and think: I’m still on the right side of the grass.”
Every day at 10am, Joe goes to work and joins his loyal team of girls, which includes daughter Marolyn, granddaughter Cheryl, and great granddaughter Lauren, 15, who works as a Saturday girl.
Joe is managing director and majority shareholder of the business but still sells holidays on the front desk and has a string of regular clients. Until 2005 he was still taking customers to Florida as part of the agency’s Go With Joe escorted tours.
But the glitz and glamour of Orlando and the early days of package holidays to Spain are a far cry from Joe’s early career.
From joining the Territorial Army at the age of 18 and a stint in France during the Second World War, Joe had a variety of jobs including helping to run a guesthouse with wife Inez in Worthing.
But it was as a greengrocer, and later fish shop owner that Joe finally settled into as a trade in Worthing.
“I knew nothing about selling fruit and veg. In those days lemons were impossible to get so I bought a case of them. Women would come to the shop asking for half a dozen and I’d say you can only have one!”
What started as one greengrocer’s soon became three, plus two fish shops, and before long Joe was supplying the local police station and post office canteens with food. “I used to take a 100 weight sack of potatoes on a trade bicycle!” laughs Joe.
Ironically, it was through this work Joe got his first taste of travel, when he was approached by one of the canteen managers who had started to sell holidays to staff to Palma, Majorca.
“He wanted to start a travel agency and felt they had a future,” says Joe, who decided to invest £2,000 to set up Strand Travel Bureau in 1960.
Joe became a shareholder in the agency where his daughter Marolyn went to work to learn the trade.
The shop almost didn’t survive those early days. “It was losing money and we were insolvent. My solicitor said we would have to close down,” says Joe.
Fortunately, help from a London-based barrister enabled them to keep the business running, but the canteen manager was forced to resign as the majority shareholder.
Not one to miss another opportunity, Joe bought further premises in the early 1960s in Lancing, used by South Downs bus company to sell tickets. He renamed it Lancing Travel and before long had obtained a British Rail licence to sell train tickets. “Most people still went on holiday in the UK in the 1960s,” recalls Joe.
Once more it was Joe’s contacts in the retail trade – this time through a fish shop owner called Adrian Hayes – that led to future opportunities for his travel business.
Hayes had grand plans to let out apartments in Spain to holidaymakers and roped Joe in to take provisions. “I took my wife and the kids there for a holiday and we took the van down to this village in Spain.
It took three days and we slept on the side of the road and peeled potatoes. We had no money to stay in hotels. When we got there the hotel was tiny and there was one small beach bar. The name of the village was Lloret de Mar.”
Hayes went on to found tour operator Panorama and Lloret de Mar established itself as one of the most popular holiday resorts on the Costa Brava.
The agency became busy selling package holidays to Spain and Jersey in the 1970s but it was an idea Joe hit on to market to affinity groups that allowed him to get his own tours off the ground. A chance meeting with a manager for Caledonian Airways at one of the ABTA conventions was the catalyst for Joe’s first organised tour to the US.
Joe took 187 Women’s Circle members on a five-night city tour to New York in 1971. The price was just £79.
“Back then the only way you could charter an aircraft was to organise it for an affinity group. We had a city tour and a farewell dinner. I loved it,” says Joe.
In later years regular Go With Joe tours were developed to Orlando, Florida. On one such tour there was an unexpected encounter with Virgin founder Richard Branson. “We were in the first-class lounge and he walked round and shook our hands,” says Joe.
A measure of Joe’s success was in the mid-1980s when Thomson Holidays approached him to promote its first package tour to China and take a group to the little-known tourist destination.
But it was quickly evident tour operators could undercut tours organised by entrepreneurs such as Joe. He says: “In 1994 Virgin used to beg us to sell its seats but a few years later it was the other way round.”
These days Joe has just the one agency, which is part of Advantage, although most of the staff have not changed.
Little can phase Joe after more than 50 years of working as a high-street retailer. “Even now, it’s not tough,” he says with a smile, “you just have to take it all in your stride.”
Travel Weekly presented Joe with a bottle of champagne to celebrate his 89th birthday…
