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at political issues, at sustainability and ecological questions. We look at good practices for
management of the National Park System, for coastal areas.”
His chair is endowed by Marriott International, headquartered in the Washington area,
and named after President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who golfed with the Marriott founder.
In the 1990s, Hawkins represented the United States at the U.N. World Tourism Organiz-
ation before the U.S. government pulled out. “We should still be there. We need to be at
the table.
“Tourism is the greatest modern voluntary transfer of wealth from rich countries to poor
countries, and we need to belong to the UNWTO to help those developing economies.
That is our future.”
Hawkins received the first Ulysses Prize awarded by the UNWTO for creating and dis-
seminating knowledge about tourism policy and management and has attracted students
whom, he says, often have a touch of wanderlust. Studying tourism usually means travel
in the future, moving from city to city or country to country for a career. In an earlier era,
these students might have studied foreign affairs or business.
Anthony Mavrogiannis received his master's degree in tourism administration from Ge-
orge Washington, and he happily admits his primary purpose was to find a position in the
business where he could travel frequently. After working as the in-house travel manager at
the National Academy of Sciences, Mavrogiannis bought the Kentlands Travel Agency in
suburban Washington and became his own boss. He is my travel agent.
In this age of the Internet and the ability to compare and buy airplane tickets, make
hotel and restaurant reservations at one's own computer, many predicted the end of travel
agents. Yet they have managed to retain approximately 30 percent of the travel business.
The American Society of Travel Agents reports a steady if small increase in business since
the digital revolution undercut so many agents. Now, rather than spending hours, if not
days, looking for the right flight at the right time as well as an affordable hotel, people like
me are turning to travel agents. Travel is expensive and making a mistake on the Internet
is costly. During my years as a daily journalist my trips were arranged by the newspaper's
travel agent. On my own I made a mess of my first attempt to arrange a complicated trip to
Brazil; thereafter I have turned to Mavrogiannis. Besides having the security of a qualified
agent making arrangements that actually work, I found I saved money with him.
During a morning spent at his office, the computer regularly pinged with notices, his
printer spewed out airline tickets and hotel confirmations, and his telephone rang dozens
of times. It was hard to imagine that travel agents once thought their profession would be-
come extinct. It wasn't just consumers using the Web to plot their own trips that threatened
his livelihood but airline companies and other parts of the industry that cut out or reduced
commissions. His solution, shared by many other agents, was to diversify and specialize.
He keeps diversity by focusing 40 percent of his business on leisure travel and 60 per-
cent on corporate. The leisure side still brings in the most money. “In the corporate world
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