Contact Information: Contact: Maria Polk President & CEO http://www.tours.com/ & http://www.sightseeing.com/ Phone: 415-332-7916
SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - February 26, 2009) - Joe King, our beloved founder and
Chairman of http://www.tours.com/ &
http://www.sightseeing.com/, and truly a travel and tourism visionary,
passed of complications from inoperable lung cancer.
Joe was a native New Yorker, born in the city in 1941; he turned 68 on
January 27. He attended Lawrenceville and Canterbury schools and then
Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, Washington, D.C. After
college he began his lifelong career in travel and tourism. At first he
represented hotel corporations based in Washington, D.C. and then Radisson
Hotels and Holiday Inns, a job that took him all over the world. He was
active in New York City with the major travel entrepreneurs and airlines
that invented in the late 60s "modern wholesale travel." Joe dealt on a
daily basis with the top tour operators of the era such as Gill Horache of
Liberty, who established the model for today's mega agencies by
popularizing the inclusion of price packaged vacations, Steve Lohr, who
created European Ski Packaging, and Stan Fisher, the inventor of package
vacations from abroad.
At one time Joe established the tour and travel department of the famous
Tavern on the Green and the Lincoln Center in New York. He founded King
International in 1980 and becoming an early pioneer of promoting the travel
business through the Internet. In the mid-1970s Joe moved to San Francisco,
which he adopted as his primary home for the rest of his life. It was there
that Joe and his ex-wife and best friend of 40 years, Maria Polk, founded
http://www.tours.com/ and
http://www.sightseeing.com/, one of the leading worldwide directories of
tours and vacations. Joe remained active in many travel and tourism
organizations and will be missed by us beyond words.
