When Roddie MacPhee joined Barrhead Travel’s board in 2011, he didn’t imagine he would help to oversee a 20-store expansion plan nearly 10 years later.
MacPhee, 81, celebrated 60 years in travel in 2021, starting his career at Dundee-based Scotts Travel’s in 1961, for three years. Selling travel in the 1960s was very different, he tells TTG, when unmarried couples sharing a room was taboo. But he got round this, he laughs – with a curtain.
“Selling single rooms was impossible, so someone had the idea of a twin room with a curtain between beds – that was fine with their families!” he says incredulously. “It seems difficult to believe this was a conversation I had to have with parents!”
MacPhee spent seven years at British European Airways – now BA – as a reservations agent, but returned to retail, for 18 years, at Ayrshire-based AT Mays, which was eventually sold to Thomas Cook.
He moved from regional director to marketing director, and AT Mays went from 20 branches in Scotland to hundreds of locations in the UK. It was a “tough” time with intense competition – notably from Lunn Poly and Pickfords, MacPhee says, nodding to one year when discount levels changed four times in one day just to keep up.
A “chance conversation” tempted MacPhee to Barrhead. “I wanted to take it easier – but it didn’t turn out that way,” he laughs. His principal role is working on Barrhead projects centred around property and facilities management.
Stand-outs in his career include his Scottish Passenger Agents’ Association presidency in 1993, “a highlight of any career,” he stresses. He is currently Scotland’s representative on Abta’s Council of Regions.
MacPhee is adamant the travel industry is a remarkable career choice and adds that product quality is now “mindblowing”.
“There was no such thing as a cruise holiday. There were scheduled shippings and people would join those to get to their holiday. Now the world of cruise is exploding.”
Asked what he would tell his teenage self, MacPhee says: “always listen carefully, to learn as much as possible, to your colleagues and customers.”
Roddie MacPhee, Barrhead Travel