For a new company to distinguish itself in an already saturated market, it requires more than just hard work and determination.

So when Franklin Travel entered Bermuda's fiercely competitive industry in 1981, its founder focused on providing that service he found lacking in many of the more established agencies -- a high standard of quality and a real commitment to the customer.

Having established such a mandate, Buddy Franklin then made sure that he and his staff adhered to it. And, backed by his 16 years of industry experience, that trait saw his tiny operation grow to what it is today -- a company with an annual volume of gross sales in excess of nine million dollars.

"Buddy started Franklin Travel 15 years ago, in December of 1981, working from temporary quarters in Mercury House on Front Street with a staff of one,'' explained his wife, Patricia Daly Franklin. "He just started by himself and then he hired one employee after the first six months, and then, after another six months, he hired another person. So I have two people now who have worked with Franklin Travel for at least 14 years. So they've been with Buddy since the inception really.'' Mrs. Daly Franklin explained that her husband actually entered the travel industry while still a teenager, at age 16. He gained a multitude of experience, working with Eastern Airlines and Pan American Airlines, in luggage handling, as a member of the grounds crew, and as an airport ticket agent.

"He learned everything,'' she said. "He worked through the airlines and then went to work for Meyer Travel. He stayed with Meyer for many years and left there, taking a lot of corporate clients with him. He started out with Franklin Travel in December of 1981 and he never looked back. It was a risky venture, but he had it in his blood I guess by that time, and just worked really hard.'' From Front Street Mr. Franklin moved to a small space in the Washington Mall a year later, now the home of Colosseum , an Italian shoe store. At that time, he employed a staff of about five. He remained there until 1985 when the company outgrew the space available, moving to its previous headquarters across from the Federal Express store in Phase 2 of the Washington Mall.

"Then he grew up, expanding the offices above the location,'' explained Mrs.

Daly Franklin. "That was the only space available at the time and it was quite untenable to have to walk up and down the stairs where both the accounts department and his office were located. We were just burgeoning at the seams and so we had to make a decision.'' The main reason her husband was such a success, the businesswoman stressed, was that, as his business grew, he continued to provide the same quality service to clients that he insisted upon when he was just a one-man operation.

And in co-operation with that insistence, it abides by certain rules: We will treat customers and each other with care and respect at all times.

Our team works to build strong customer loyalty by providing service excellence. Service excellence means providing accurate, dependable and efficient service while recognising our customers' needs and feelings.

We welcome the challenge that working in the travel industry demands and strive for clear communication between our customers, ourselves and our travel partners.

Our on-going commitment to learning, allows for our personal growth and team development to provide the highest level of customer satisfaction.

"Buddy's always had a focus on quality,'' she said. "I just assisted. I was working for the Xerox Corporation and so became very interested in the quality movement through Xerox's approach to it and brought that with me to the island. I had had ten years experience with Xerox and I actually ran the Xerox division here for Tony Smith of AF Smith for about five years.

"While I was doing that, I started the Bermuda Quality Awareness Team (BQAT) after which we ran a `Mission Statement' contest. I was not involved in the judging but they chose Buddy's mission statement which I helped his team create. They wrote every word. And when you write a mission statement, every single word is crafted, and every single word is important to everything else in the business. So the quality emphasis has been there for quite a number of years.'' Mrs. Daly Franklin said that although her company had recently rewritten its mission statement, its commitment to that same quality service provided by her husband was no less.

"It now reads as `We welcome the challenge of providing personalised quality service to ensure our customer and team expectations are fully satisfied'. It shows what you're trying to achieve as a company. And that's important to us.

Most of the staff have gone through quality training -- both from a problem-solving point of view so that we'll all be kind of speaking from the same hymnal, and then to gain a better understanding of what step of any given problem any individual might be focusing on. The idea is so that each person can problem solve on their own. So they can follow through with the problem to its solution, and so that they're truly empowered to make decisions, which is great. I don't want them to have to wait for me or to have to wait for their supervisor. They need to be able to solve the problem all the way through and offer a solution on their own. That's great.'' Now company president, Mrs. Daly Franklin explained that it was in 1991 when her husband took ill. Just before he died however, he spotted what he believed to be the perfect location for his constantly expanding agency.

"Before he died, he saw these premises and wanted to move. He looked at them, and wanted them but Sabrina's shoe store was still here and she couldn't make a decision whether she was going to stay or go,'' explained Mrs. Daly Franklin. "And then finally, she made the decision that she would leave this space which was great and we moved in at the end of April. It's about 3,000 square feet, double our previous space, which is quite a bit, but it's turned out that we needed it all.'' The only space not there for the agency, she said, belongs to Daly Associates, a consulting/training business she operates. Franklin Travel is using that space for computer training, she said.

With her husband gone, she added, the team had pulled together, and were successfully able to arrange quality vacations for their clients because of it.

"Most of (the others) have more experience in the travel business than I do; almost all of them. My addition to the company is my marketing and sales expertise and some people skills I believe, because I have a lot of management experience. So I just do the personnel work and the marketing and I'm there if they want to throw a problem against me at which time I can help them to see if it's the best solution that we can come up with.

"Sometimes they'll say, `Well we've always done it this way but I don't know why we do it this way' and what they're doing is looking for me to maybe change it. In those situations I'll have to back up and say, `Well let me ask Sandy why we've always made that decision because she's been here for 14 years,' or `Let me ask Kay, who's been here for 14 and a half years,' or `Let me ask Roxy who's been here for ten years. Let's see why it was created that way and whether they know of any reason why we should not change it.' And then we all put our best heads together and try and come up with a good solution.'' This joint problem-solving method works to enhance the quality of the service they provide, said Mrs. Daly Franklin, but that service is amplified by "just good quality service''.

"I teach a course called `Quality Service Skills' which most of the staff have been through. A two day course where you really talk about being empathetic with customers. There are lots of problems out there with travel these days. And it's not easy. We're just the go-between between lots of different partners -- the airlines, the cruise lines, the hotels, the rental car agencies and so on. If they don't do their best, then we have to answer for it, otherwise, why would anyone use a travel agent? "We get paid for those suppliers so we have to sort of walk a delicate line between honouring our commitment to serving our external customers, and also protecting our internal customer -- our partner. We try and do that with a little bit of grace; a little bit of sensitivity and `empathy', is the key word; the `Big E' word, as we say. That is a trained behaviour, a learned behaviour and we are all getting better at it. It's hard to do when you're frazzled, but that's the first thing which will ingratiate your customer to you. I teach them to say, `Gee, I'm sorry. I know how frustrating it is when you travel and it doesn't go perfectly right. We wanted it to go well for you but we failed you.' `We', of course, being the whole travel community failed and we have to hold up the end of the stick I guess, or get hit with it. And we're doing this because we have that attention for detail and I'd like to think we have very long-serving members of staff who like to focus on quality.'' GRAND DOYENNE -- President of Franklin Travel, Patricia Daly Franklin says the company serves to meet the needs of its clientele.

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