Anthony Travel Takes Notre Dame, the U.S. Naval Academy and 10,000 Fans Overseas for Football
By Cheryl Hall
The Dallas Morning News
When Notre Dame and the U.S. Naval Academy square off in their football season opener on Sept. 1, the Fighting Irish will have an unusual home-field advantage.
The game is being played in Dublin at the Emerald Isle Classic.
But the teams will be on equal footing when it comes to travel arrangements. Dallas-based Anthony Travel Inc. is handling the trip for both athletic departments and the more than 10,000 loyal fans trekking to Ireland from all 50 states and Canada.
This is the first regular-season collegiate football game played outside the United States in 16 years, when these same teams met in the Irish capital in 1996.
The classic also includes an NCAA Division III college game and five high school pairings, including Jesuit College Preparatory School of Dallas vs. Loyola Academy of Chicago.
Handling arrangements for the teams, coaches, athletic staff, select band members and fans is the travel agency’s largest undertaking since John Anthony opened for business in 1989 with a Sabre computer and two phone lines.
The project will bring in more than 15 percent of the agency’s projected $125 million in 2012 revenue, Anthony says.
Since planning began in 2009, his staff has made 40 sojourns to Ireland, set up 36 daily tour excursions, booked castles and locked up the links at 29 golf courses.
Anthony has been three times, primarily to meet with tourism officials — with one exception.
The typical package costs $2,000 to $2,500, plus airfare. The top seller was a one-week, three-city package.
Anthony doesn’t expect another 16-year gap before a regular-season gridiron game is played outside the U.S. “When people see that this game sold out — 48,000 tickets — six months in advance, I don’t think this will be the last one you’ll see.”
Planning internationally
Chet Gladchuk, athletic director for the Naval Academy, was worried about staging a game in a foreign country without a local promoter.
Anthony and his agency also arranged travel packages for 2,500 American fans the first time Notre Dame played in Ireland.
Even though there are four times as many travelers for this game as there were in 1996, John Heisler, senior associate athletic director at Notre Dame, says planning has been a breeze by comparison. Dublin had so few hotel rooms back then that fans on tour the week before the game had to check out on game day so people who were touring the next week could check in.
And this isn’t even Anthony’s most complicated international undertaking. Last summer, the agency made arrangements for 22 college football and basketball teams that went on exhibition tours.
The most notable was a 13-day tour by Duke University’s Blue Devils, which played the Chinese Olympic basketball team in three cities and then traveled to Dubai to play the United Arab Emirates National Team.
Nothing was easy about the trip — language, visas and Muslim religious holidays that had to be respected. The charter plane nearly didn’t get to land in Beijing. It took down-to-the-wire conference phone negotiations by Duke, the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Embassy in China and Anthony to secure Chinese government permission.
Testing the waters
Anthony founded his agency 23 years ago with his sister and a friend with a plan to focus on college athletic departments, study-abroad programs and university events.
Before Anthony ditched his day job as a CPA for Ernst & Young in Fort Worth, the Notre Dame alumnus tested the waters. The Irish were undefeated in the fall of 1988. Before bids went out for the national championship at the Fiesta Bowl in Phoenix, Anthony secured 10 to 20 seats from 12 cities on various airlines at cheap prices.
He sold out the seats in a couple of days by taking out four-line classified ads in the campus newspaper.
In 1991, Anthony won Notre Dame’s entire travel business by agreeing to move to South Bend, Ind., to oversee the account. But he kept the main office in Dallas.
In 1994, Southern Methodist University became college client No. 2.
Anthony Travel now has 43 universities under year-round contracts and another 25-plus engaged on special projects, Anthony says.
Anthony has 27 offices (mostly on campuses) in 15 states and 175 employees, including 67 at its largest office, in Dallas.
Anthony bought out his partners in 1996.
Going small to get big
Notre Dame, which still uses Anthony for all of its university travel, is the agency’s largest account. Disney Sports is its second. Anthony will handle arrangements for almost 50 events at ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex at Walt Disney World Resort in 2013.
For many travel agencies, the last two decades have been tough as the demise of airline commissions decimated the industry.
But Anthony Travel has made the Dallas 100 list of fastest-growing companies 10 times, including the last seven consecutive years. Jerry White, director of SMU’s Caruth Institute for Entrepreneurship, which compiles the annual list, says he can’t think of another company (of 2,100 winners in 21 years) that has pulled off such a winning streak.
Anthony explains the achievement this way:
“Ironically, by going small, we got big. We narrowed our focus and then we got lucky. In spite of everything that’s happened in the world — 9/11 and the Great Recession — college athletics has grown and sports events have grown. Universities are resilient economic models.”
AT A GLANCE: Emerald Isle Classic
When: Aug. 31-Sept. 1
Where: Dublin, Ireland
Who’s playing: Notre Dame and U.S. Naval Academy, two NCAA Division III teams, seven U.S. high school teams, two Canadian high school teams and one United Kingdom club team
Fun facts: It’s the first sellout of an American college football game on non-U.S. soil. The Irish Tourist Board estimates tourists will generate more than $100 million and is using the event to kick off its largest tourism campaign.
