Posted on: Tuesday, April 23, 2002

EDITORIAL
Bob MacGregor: A true tourism pioneer

It's increasingly popular these days to declare that tourism in Hawai'i has to "diversify" beyond the usual fun-and-sun approaches. The argument is that our visitor industry has "matured" and it is time to try new things such as business conferences, eco-tourism, sports tourism and more.

All that may very well be true. But to have become mature, the industry had to grow from somewhere, from its infancy.

If any one individual was responsible for much of that growth, he was Bob MacGregor, who died last week at the age of 88. Services for the Hawai'i tourism pioneer begin at 8:30 today at Diamond Head Mortuary.

MacGregor's career in Island tourism spanned more than 50 years, from the earliest days of postwar tourism through the boom years of the 1970s and '80s and through to today. In the early pre-and-post statehood days, the ever-smiling, polo-playing MacGregor was in many ways the "face" of the local visitor industry.

Yes, he was selling fun-and-sun, and he did it in every way he knew how, from developing retail and wholesale tours to the Islands, through Trade Wind Tours, through personally meeting and greeting folks whom he felt could be helpful to the emerging travel business.

He formed one of Hawai'i's major travel agencies, International Travel Service, and was involved in a variety of local innovations such as Pearl Harbor cruise tours, air-conditioned motor coach tours and Polynesian shows.

It may have been inevitable that tourism in the Islands would boom after the war ended, statehood arrived and the jets began flying across the Pacific. But it wasn't inevitable that Hawai'i would emerge with a worldwide reputation for innovation and quality in the visitor industry.

For that reputation, Bob MacGregor deserves considerable credit.