Mark Egan put tourism on the map

By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

It is difficult in Our Honolulu today to keep up with new faces, much less remember the ones that went away. Mark Egan was a long time ago and from an era that nobody under 50 can remember.

But he was one of those people who appeared in the right place at the right time. He set Hawai'i on a course that resulted in an economic revolution, with tourism coming out on top.

The future doesn't mean much without the past, so let me tell you about this man who died in San Francisco not long ago. His death went unnoticed in Hawai'i.

"He was the architect of the Hawai'i Visitors Bureau and developed a formula that we used for 40 years," said Bob Allen, who was president of Gray Line then. "Mark Egan was so far ahead of his time that the HVB became the most respected tourist promotion agency in the country."

Chuck Gee, dean emeritus of the University of Hawai'i at Manoa's School of Travel Industry Management, called Egan a "pioneer in the modern tourism movement. He was able to influence a lot of movers and shakers."

The year was 1945, the end of World War II, a time when the economic powerhouse in Hawai'i was sugar, the Big Five made policy, and plantation managers served almost as royalty. Pineapple came next in the pecking order, with a lot of slick advertising.

Then there was tourism, far back, a distant third, a sort of romantic appendage based in Waikiki, where there wasn't a single parking meter or stop light.

That's the year the Tourist Bureau was reorganized and renamed the Hawai'i Visitors Bureau, with R. Alex Anderson, composer of "Lovely Hula Hands," as president. The Bureau hired a major out of the Army, Mark Egan, as the first director.

A graduate of Northwestern University in Illinois, he had been, at 23, the youngest sales manager of a major hotel in the United States. At age 30, he was executive vice president of the Cleveland Convention and Visitors Bureau.

To demonstrate how close Waikiki was to the Mainland, he worked with an airline just breaking into the Hawai'i market, United, to deliver an issue of the New York Herald Tribune to Honolulu on the same day it was printed. This was big news at the time.

He set off on a nonstop Mainland promotion tour, traveling 15,000 miles and visiting almost every major city in the country. Egan linked the Hawai'i Visitors Bureau (today the Hawai'i Visitors & Convention Bureau) with travel agents all over the nation and talked the American Society of Travel Agents into meeting in Hawai'i in 1949.

He dreamed up the idea of taking photos of tourists in Hawai'i and sending the pictures back to their home town newspapers. The airlines took over the job for their own publicity, but it helped Hawai'i just the same.

In just five years, Egan had put in place a highly successful promotion agency that was enthusiastically supported by Hawai'i's fledgling tourism industry. That industry became the giant it is today.