Bon Voyage Travel Celebrates 50 Years
By Tara Kirkpatrick
The success story of Bon Voyage Travel begins with a founder who saw opportunity where others didn’t.
It’s a skill that helped entrepreneur Peter Evans strategically pivot again and again in his company’s 50 years in operation, building a portfolio of more than 100,000 vacations planned, a robust online and cruise division and recognition as a premier partner of global travel networks.
Simply put, he built a company around good people, great judgment and the best business relationships.
“His entrepreneurial vision for this company was not one vision in 1976 that stayed true for 50 years,” said Bon Voyage Travel President and COO Ryan Hansen. “It was the evolution, the pivoting with the times, with technology changes.” Other travel agencies in Tucson folded “because they didn’t have the business acumen and the willingness and the vision to make these moves.”
Industry insiders and loyal clients are quick to laud the legacy.
“For more than 50 years, Bon Voyage Travel has earned its reputation as one of the most trusted, respected and innovative travel companies in the industry,” said Marc Kazlauskas, president of Norwegian Cruise Line.
Added restaurant mogul and longtime client Sam Fox, “They’ve just always been there for us. Their commitment to Tucson and the community they are in has been fantastic.”
From Airline Tickets Only to Strategic Growth
With an ambition to start his own business, Evans launched Bon Voyage Travel in Tucson with a partner in 1976, initially focusing on airline ticket sales. His was one of roughly 100 such agencies in the region, at the time.
“We were just an airline ticket factory,” Evans said. “Back then, you had to get an airline ticket from either a travel agent…or you went to an airline ticket office or the airport. My standard joke is…we opened by this little strip mall near the Rillito racetrack and we had more flies from the horses than we had customers.”
Evans bought out his partner after a year, and dug in to expanding Bon Voyage Travel, but not without challenges.
“We struggled,” he recalled. “I was always good at getting business, but in the early days I didn’t manage the financial side very well. My wife, Kathy, helped with the start of it. I wouldn’t have succeeded without her.” He’s also indebted to friends David and the late-George Mehl, the developers of La Paloma, who helped him secure a line of credit to stay in business during an early rough patch.
Evans persevered, and would grow the company to 16 offices and add one in Phoenix. The company started securing more corporate accounts, a strategic transition to move forward from solely airline tickets. By 1998, Bon Voyage Travel was the largest corporate travel agency in Southern Arizona, and soon after, the largest privately held corporate travel agency in Arizona. The 2000s then ushered in the company’s successful foray into online and luxury cruise pursuits.
From the start, Evans had an eye for good hires. “I flew at 30,000 feet with ideas,” he said. “I always tried to surround myself with people who could execute.” He also treated his employees well–some of his advisors have stayed at the company more than 40 years.
Wendy Hathorn, executive VP of strategy for Bon Voyage Travel, started at age 16 as an airline ticket delivery driver. “Peter and Kathy created an environment where they genuinely cared about the wellbeing of the team,” she said. “By the time I was in college, I was handling the bookkeeping and working under Kathy. I always credit her for keeping the business on track while Peter was the idea man who kept the business evolving with the times.”
Arizona Athletics
One of Bon Voyage Travel’s most significant corporate accounts was Arizona Athletics–a relationship that would last more than three decades.
Bon Voyage Travel had a representative inside McKale Center who would help organize travel accommodations for the athletic teams, most notably the men’s basketball team, the coaches and the boosters – often on short notice during March Madness.
“What we learned and what we did with Final Four trips was miraculous,” Evans said. “It was not without hiccups and mistakes, but we learned as we went along. We got really good at it.” Among the best stories from those days, Bon Voyage Travel managed a booster trip that had the first DC-10 land in Tucson and in a nod to the agency’s full-service approach, once found a way to respectfully return a wealthy donor’s false teeth left in a hotel room.
“They handled everything so gracefully and wonderfully and just gave us a lot of peace, knowing that we could focus on the team and hopefully victory,” said then-Arizona AD Kathleen “Rocky” LaRose.
Now a prominent photographer, LaRose continues to host large group trips with Bon Voyage Travel for adventures around the world. “Thank you to Peter for approaching me with this idea,” she said. “It’s turned out to be one of the great joys in my life.”
Arizona Athletics also introduced Evans to the perfect successor–Ryan Hansen, a talented leader who started his career as the operations manager for the men’s basketball team.
His deep friendship with Evans, fostered over nearly 20 years of arranging team travel, meeting for lunch, talking sports and even coaching Evans’ son at a Lute Olson basketball camp, helped convince Hansen to take over Bon Voyage Travel in 2011 as Evans was running additional business ventures.
“He said would you ever consider leaving athletics?” Hansen recalled. “You’ve got a great logistics and operations mind. It made sense to come on board and run the day-to-day operations. We had a vision for the business, to grow it and do exactly what we did.”
Evans added, “I know it was a hard decision for him, but he took a leap of faith and it turned out to be great for both of us.”
Decisions that Triumphed
Perhaps the longevity of Bon Voyage Travel can best be heralded through the many pivot points Evans embraced to move the company forward.
“I think one of the things that clearly was the key to our success was our ability to adapt to changes,” he said.
Starting with the company’s first enterprise – airline tickets. “There were so many changes in the airline industry. All of a sudden, they were no longer paying us commission. We had to go to a fee base. That was a total paradigm switch, and there were a lot of folks with their head in the sand…and they didn’t react,” Evans said.
In cruise planning, he went directly to the cruise lines with his bold sales ideas. Bon Voyage Travel, for instance, created a unique cruise sale that offered buyers a two-category upgrade in every level, not just starting at the baseline cabins, which was usual practice.
“I said let me do this,” Evans said. “I’ll do all the advertising. Let me sell your ships a two-category upgrade on every cabin category. Just let me try it, and we just blew the doors off. We were successful and we ran that sale a long time.”
Hathorn agreed. “He’s a marketing genius, he would come up with these ideas, but he would put himself at risk to get them to listen to him to engage. That’s how our cruise business took off.”
Indeed, today, Bon Voyage Travel is one of the biggest cruise sellers in the world.
When the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks decimated air travel, Evans refused to lay off his staff, even under financial stress. He then took the opportunity to dive into the digital travel footprint. “He said, let’s market what we do. Let’s expand the horizons outside of just the radius of 50 miles of Tucson,” Hansen said. “If you look at the agency community today that didn’t enter into an online presence of some sort, those agencies no one knows about.”
Finally, when COVID-19 stopped the world, Evans and Hansen sat for hours on his back patio with two legal pads and figured out how to stay in business with zero revenue for a year. “He could see beyond what many in the industry were saying, that it would only be 30 days and we’ll get restarted,” Hansen said.
The Next Chapter
With a milestone honored, Bon Voyage Travel now looks optimistically toward the future. The agency was acquired in January 2026 by arrivia, a global travel rewards platform across hotel, resort and financial brands.
Bon Voyage Travel will continue to operate under its name with Hansen at the helm. Evans will remain in an advisory capacity.
“We had been approached over the last five, six years, maybe longer, by companies interested in buying us, and landed with arrivia,” said Evans. “Finally, we found one that seemed to be a great fit.”
Pictured above – Peter Evans, Founder, Bon Voyage Travel. Photo by Brent G. Mathis
READ THE FULL SPECIAL REPORT HERE.
