Redemption Flight ✈️
The founder of one of the internet’s best-known travel sites only found success after his past prevented him from running an airline.
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If you’ve ever stumbled upon a cheap ticket discount site, there’s a good chance that you’ve uncovered a Hawaiian guy’s redemption story.
Back in the 1970s, aviation-industry entrepreneur Mike Hartley was attempting to keep his regional Hawaii-based airline, Island Pacific Air, afloat. (Hawaii has traditionally had a number of small airlines that serve the islands.)
And because he was having so much trouble doing that through traditional means, he decided to use his planes for something questionable—he attempted to smuggle 30 pounds of cocaine from Peru into the United States.
He and his accomplices were caught. He served jail time, but through some legal-system maneuvering, only had to serve a few months and was allowed work-release. But it gradually disrupted his career as an aviation executive—and when he tried launching another airline a decade later, his legal issues led federal regulators to prevent the airline from launching while he was still associated with the company.
So what does a disgraced aviation executive do as a Plan B? In Hartley’s case, he happened to know an easy way to get access to airline tickets at extreme discounts, first promoting them by using the phrase “Cheap Tickets” in a series of classified ads.
This became the basis from which Hartley built one of the earliest building blocks of the online travel industry. Cheap Tickets came to life in 1986, and by the time the internet had come along, his reputation had been restored to the point that he and his wife Sandy took part in the 1996 Olympics’ opening ceremony.
The company’s web presence, which came about in 1998, was perfectly timed to the moment—and soon the internet made up nearly all of Cheap Tickets’ business. By 2001, the Hartleys sold this company for $280 million at a time the market for tech stocks was sinking. He’s now a philanthropist.
If you have a couple tough skeletons in your closet, there’s always time to turn it around.
» Wanna learn more? Check out our piece on Cheap Tickets last year, “Stumbled Into a Discount.”