When Gadabout Travel Agency opened in Palos Hills in 1975, there already were a handful of Chicago-area travel agencies specializing in trips to Ireland.
As the new kid on the block, original owner Rose Lynn said she worked hard to build her clientele.
It paid off. Forty years later, Gadabout is the sole remaining agency among the family-owned specialty agencies she knew of at the time. And it is still in the same location at 10552 S. Roberts Road.
Lynn, who no longer owns the agency but is friends with owner Pam Carroll, knew survival might be a long shot.
“So I shouldn’t be going for another travel agency, right?” Lynn said, reflecting on the competition she was up against at the time. “But I did. I just decided I was going to do it.”
Lynn did have her background going for her: She was born and raised in County Mayo, Ireland.
She said during her school days, tourism in Ireland was often discussed and encouraged in the classroom.
Students were basically told to “go out and sell Ireland,” Lynn said. “That would be work for us as young students and put more money into the pockets of businesses in Ireland.”
Lynn said she didn’t need much prodding. With relatives in the United States who always were telling her family about “the great U.S.A.,” she already was interested in world travel.
After earning a certificate of education and a certificate of travel at Gortnor Abbey, a secondary school in County Mayo, she married Tom Lynn in 1961, and they traveled to the United States.
“We were planning on being here just a very short time,” Lynn said, just to “see how we like it. But we loved it. The very minute I came here I just loved it.”
The Lynns “settled in,” she said, and began raising a family. By 1974, their three children all were of school age.
“That’s when I decided it was my time to go after the travel industry,” she said.
In those days, Lynn said, starting a travel business wasn’t a simple matter of finding a good spot that would work for the business owner and setting up shop.
“At the time, the governing bodies of the airline industry were very strict because the tickets would be stocked in your office. So they were very strict about location and window frontage and exposure to the public,” Lynn said.
She said she “fell in love” with new retail construction in Palos Hills but couldn’t accept the rental space available because it was next door to the Copper Kettle.
“The airlines would never have put up with that because there was a pub next door,” Lynn said.
So Lynn convinced her landlord, Jim Roupas, to let her have the corner site at 10552 Roberts Road, the space he planned to use for his office.
She opened in 1975 with high hopes.
“It took a while because, naturally, I was up against (established) competition,” Lynn said. “But I hired good people, and of course to be successful you have to have good people around you.”
Lynn said her business was 75 percent international, offering trips to Ireland, England and Scotland, among others.
She said all airline tickets at the time were handwritten and had to be bought from a travel agency, and “there was no security at O’Hare,” so passengers didn’t experience the wait times they do now.
In 1978, Lynn said, “the whole industry changed” when the airlines were deregulated. Another blow came in 1991, when the Gulf War caused fuel prices to rise, Lynn said.
“We lost a lot of major carriers,” she said.
Lynn weathered all of the storms and built a loyal clientele that she was able to pass on to her successors — one who bought the business in 1997 but had to give it up in 2000 because of health concerns, and then Carroll, of Oak Lawn, who was one of the “good people” Lynn hired in 1987.
“She was the fastest learner I had,” Lynn said.
Lynn hired Carroll so she could go home in the afternoons when her children got home from school. And Carroll took the job because Gadabout was very close to her son’s preschool.
Despite their relationship having begun on a practical basis, the two came to be fast friends, running the business like a family and working together until Lynn’s retirement in 1997.
On any given day at the time, the women said, one might find a baby in a playpen on the premises or stray cats being fed, but it didn’t seem to bother the customers. Lynn said clients began bringing food for the cats. And it still was first and foremost a business.
“We were low-key,” Lynn said, “but very diligent about making sure everything went smoothly and no hassle, and they could always call on us at home. We always gave our home number to the client in case they ran into any trouble.”
When Carroll became the owner in 2000, she said, she used all of the training she had gotten under Lynn. It didn’t hurt that she inherited many of Lynn’s clients, who also have referred family members.
Lynn, who now lives in Lemont, said she thinks client loyalty has been a key to Gadabout’s success.
“Word of mouth is better than any advertising, isn’t it?” Lynn said.
Still, Carroll has had her challenges along the way. Shortly after she became an agency owner, airlines quit paying commissions to travel agents, she said. In 2001, Ireland had an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease and travel to Ireland virtually stopped. Those who had bought tickets understandably wanted refunds, Carroll said. Later that year came the 9-11 terrorist attacks, which brought airline traffic to a standstill, a devastating blow to the travel industry.
“Within two weeks of 9-11, agencies all over were closing their doors,” Carroll said. She said there were agencies “on every corner back then and they all went under.”
Carroll was able to stay afloat because she had been very careful with her finances, she said, so when customers asked to have their tickets refunded, she was able to accommodate them and still pay the bills.
Carroll’s ability to change with the times has helped keep Gadabout a viable travel agency over her 15 years as owner. She expanded offerings to include current popular destinations, booking group travel and destination weddings as a good chunk of her business.
Carroll said she also has had a secret weapon for the past eight years: Rosario Perez, 28, of Alsip.
“Not only is she bilingual and can speak Spanish,” Carroll said, “(but) when these brides are getting married in Mexico and the Dominican Republic, she can write the emails in Spanish, which is huge. It’s something you don’t think of if you book a destination wedding on the Internet: Who’s helping you plan the wooden dance floor on the beach?”
Carroll said she plans to keep Gadabout Travel “open forever” because she loves what she’s doing every day.
“How many people can say that?” Carroll said.
Lynn thinks anything might be possible.
“Who’d ever believe that it would last this long, because at that time when I started Pam, I thought, ‘What is she thinking of?’ ” Lynn said.
The same might have been asked in 1975 of Lynn for opening a specialty travel agency despite existing competition.
Lynn’s answer to that, delivered with an Irish brogue still apparent after more than 50 years in the United States: “I was determined,” she said, “and it was a dream and I accomplished it, I guess.”
Ginger Brashinger is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.
