If you’ve ever stepped into Alexandre Chemla’s office, you’ve seen it. You could call it a symbol of his continued growth from small beginnings. But it’s just a long, wooden conference table — kind of.
“Everyone tells me how smart the idea to have a conference table here in my office is,” says Chemla, the president and owner of ALTOUR. “I try to explain to them that I was not smart at all. It was my dining room table. I didn’t have money to buy a desk so I brought it up.”
On June 15, 1991, that table moved into a 20-square-foot office at 4 Park Ave., when Chemla founded the luxury and midmarket travel agency. He had left his native France for the U.S. with a friend who was being moved to New York to run the North American operations for Club Med. Then Chemla, after about a decade working with his friend, branched out on his own.
His friend called him crazy for opening a business in the midst of the Gulf War and a recession.
“When I started my company, I did not have much to start a company on,” Chemla says in a still-thick accent. “But [I] wanted to accomplish one of my dreams, which was to put the best people together. … That’s what the company is built on — people and respect. It has been one thing I took from my previous job, which was to try to treat people well and grow it as a family.”
He’d seen that atmosphere at Club Med. When he went to Bangkok, for example, one of the Club Med employees would be waiting at the airport for him, even though he or she had never met him before.
So the table brings Chemla back to his roots. Because he maintained the same atmosphere ever since those first days and first few employees, he’s kept growing throughout the years — on average, 20 percent annually. ALTOUR opened a West Coast headquarters in Los Angeles in 1993. Last year, it doubled in size thanks to a joint agreement with American Express Travel, along with the acquisition of 12 of its offices.
Today, with its 75 offices and more than 1,000 employees, ALTOUR has a travel volume, which includes gross invoiced sales for all travel-related services, of more than $800 million — $205 million in L.A. alone.
“Dollars are very important and that’s what makes or breaks a company, but you will not earn the dollar if you don’t treat your people well and if you don’t respect them as much as you respect your clients — if not even more,” Chemla says. “There’s a lot of mistakes that one can do, but … building a company without creating some foundation to it, it’s like putting a building up without any foundation. Then, you know what, it could very easily collapse. Make sure that your foundation is strong … and then you can build whatever you want because you’re on the solid ground.”
Here’s how Chemla builds respect with employees and clients through an open-door environment.
