Ask Arthur C. Tauck Jr. ’53 ’79P to name his favorite destination, and he says, “It doesn’t matter where you go. Your time is more dependent upon the people around you. And so, whenever you take a trip, and you meet nice people, and you have good weather, that’s my best trip.”
He contemplates this for a moment, and adds, “However, if you’d like to know the place that I would go back to alone and sit down and meditate on a rock, it would be in the high altitude near the glaciers of the Canadian Rockies.”
Tauck, an innovator and philanthropist, built his life’s work on traveling the world.
He was just 27 when his father handed him the keys to the motor coach company he had founded in 1925, Tauck Tours. Over the next several decades, Tauck transformed the company into a world-renowned tour operator, Tauck World Discovery, based in Connecticut.
The company now operates on seven continents and provides services that include motorcoach tours, limousine tours, small ship cruises and riverboat cruises.
Tauck is credited with many innovations in the travel industry—chartered air and motorcoach tour packages, helicopter sightseeing in Hawaii, heli-hiking in which helicopters transport hikers to remote places and the “Yellow Roads of Europe” series that takes tourists along back roads less traveled.
“The thing I enjoyed the most about the industry is just meeting people from around the world and having a relationship with them and dealing with them, doing business with them,” Tauck says. “You have to be very conscious of the differences from one culture to another culture. And I find that as fun, rather than business. I enjoy being with people.”