I HAVE A GOOD OFFER Norway and Sweden. A huge project with a turnover of several hundreds of millions of Danish crowns… and a huge deficit. But once again what mattered to me was to attract people to all my shops – and it worked… People flocked to the shops in hundreds of thousands to pick up holiday brochures, and brochures for hotels and inns as well as summerhouse brochures. The following year they also distributed ”Larsen Kør Selv Ferie” (Larsen Self-Drive Holidays), which was the next addition. This was a company that, in association with a big English company, offered camping holiday all over Europe – and mind you, without needing to bring along a tent or a caravan. In fact, all you needed to bring was your toothbrush – everything else was ready and waiting for you at hundreds of camping sites. In 1995, I bought a holiday centre in Gedser together with a friend – John Nissen. It consisted of 56 houses, a camping site, swimming complex, restaurant and cafeteria. Now we had a complete holiday collection that covered nearly every type of holiday so that we were no longer dependant on the weather and the customers’ financial position. We were able to offer holidays for everybody – in all price groups – and both in Denmark and abroad. Jysk Sengetøjslager could offer it all… Even Larsen Golftours was on offer… Since we were arranging holidays to all sorts of countries anyway, it did not take much to choose some of the most popular golf destinations and sell an additional package with golf – a very exciting product that we actually made money from… which was in fact very difficult – or practically impossible in the entire holiday sector. Every year I thought – possibly somewhat naively – that now I would succeed – but the fact remains that almost every year something came up which ruined my calculations… First it was the weather in Mexico, then the first Gulf war, then airlines that broke the contract or went broke, then earthquakes, revolution and war, tourists being killed in Egypt etc. However, there was one year – 1994-95 – when I did in fact succeed in making a small profit of about DKK 5 million at Larsen Travel… This was an isolated occurrence, though… 155
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