8 June 2000
You would think the Johannesburg-based Golden Day Tours’ name is a dead giveaway to the type of clients it serves.
But it isn’t. Not that its owner-manager didn’t try.
Audrey Devendish, 82, set it up with an eye to providing specialised services to senior citizens. It just made sense. She was one herself. She had travelled extensively. She understood their demands and requirements. Or so she thought.
Devendish didn’t take into account the fact that not all senior citizens liked being surrounded by their kind all the time. Many in fact had an aversion to being lumped in the demographic category.
"I learned that older people don’t like being classified as old," she said. "They don’t like joining tours packaged for the senior citizens because they don’t like being surrounded by ‘fuddy-duddies’, as they call them."
So she switched focus and today, Golden Day caters to all age brackets. The lesson she learned: go after the senior citizens by not going after them.
She set up the travel agency to keep her busy when her husband passed away in 1991. Today, one of her two children help her run the business. They have been telling her to stop work but she’s said no.
At her age, she considers her good health a gift that shouldn’t be wasted by simply sitting still and expecting her children to do things for her when she is still capable of doing things for herself.
Prior to becoming a travel agent, she was a social worker. "It helped me to understand people because people do funny things," she said. "When people grow older they should mature. But this doesn’t happen at all. They become more demanding."
Golden Day Tours might have not achieved its original objective of exclusively serving the senior traveller but to Devendish, she would have it no different.
"I can’t sit still," she said. About a week after this interview in Hong Kong, she boarded the Trans-Siberian train, travelling between Beijing and Moscow.
