A World to Explore
Rick Steves promotes greater perspective through mindful international travel
Rick Steves (BA 1978) bounds onto the Kane Hall dais for a November lecture and issues a favorite ice-breaker to the throng of undergrad travel-dreamers and spry elder-hostellers. “How many of you are planning a trip to Europe?” he asks.
A smattering of hands rise. It is deepest off-season, after all.
“How about in the next 20 to 30 years?”
Every single hand shoots up, with a rising exaltation. He’s got them.
Truth is, he probably had them at hello.
It would be accurate, if incomplete, to call the charismatic Steves a travel guru. The founder and chief idealist of Edmond-based Rick Steves’ Europe has transformed a vagabond tour company into a $27 million empire of guide and phrase books, tours, travel gear, television and radio. His best-selling travel books and shows that air in high-rotation on PBS stations across the land have mobilized a tribe of “Rickniks” who blissfully follow his gospel of enthusiastic, receptive, suck-the-marrow-out-of travel to Italy’s cliff-side Cinque Terre, the isolated alpine hamlet of Gimmelwald, and the quintessentially Parisian mise en scène of the rue Cler, to name but a few of his “Back Door” finds.
Everytraveler
Despite being, quite literally, the company’s brand, Steves hasn’t achieved all this by being an icon. Or by billing himself a globe-trotting sophisticate. His success has come by painting himself a flesh-and-blood-and-backpack travel companion.
Steves is the guy you might see popping snapshots at Madrid’s Prado, chatting up locals at a Dingle pub or hopping the TGV from Lyon to Avignon on any of his 130 days a year on the continent. He is Everytraveler, from his pedestrian brown leather walkers to his boyish blond hair reminiscent of Dartmoor thatch—which is appropriate, since it was in that ancient hinterland of southwestern England that Steves first decided to become a travel writer.
Dartmoor capped Steves’ epic first “Europe through the gutter” tour the summer after his high school graduation. But his literary aspirations were hedged by a certain pragmatism that led him to the UW Business School upon his return. “I knew that you can’t just live off air, or poetry,” he says. “So I got a business degree to help me become an entrepreneur, to find my own niche and make it viable.”
Steves was lucky enough to find that his passion could be viable. While still at the UW he decided to turn his Europe-on-the-cheap experiences into an Experimental College course. He expected a handful of students to fork over the $8 cover charge. Instead, 100 of their parents showed up.
“I felt like some kind of thief or con artist,” he recalls. “Because here I was just telling stories and showing slides and I made enough money to pay for a plane ticket to Europe. I thought, this is too good to be true. So I taught like a madman, anywhere I could.”
Grassroots publishing empire
After graduating with degrees in management and European history, Steves opened a recital studio in his hometown of Edmonds, and split time between giving piano lessons and budget travel classes. The proceeds kept him in airplane tickets and rail passes. And the course notes became the manuscript for “Europe Through the Back Door,” his first book, self-published in 1980 (and now in its 24th edition).
Shortly after, Steves branched into van tours of Europe, which began as haphazard affairs. “People used to add extra money to their checks,” he recalls. “In their mind, I was a non-profit organization.”
Not for long. When Steves noticed that the promotional handbook for his Europe In 22 Days tour began disappearing from his travel classes, he decided to publish the itinerary. This became the first in a growing series of Rick Steves’ Europe guide books that now navigate the independent traveler from Lisbon to Budapest, Athens to Oslo, and all worthy points in between.
Expanding to other media
Beginning in the early 1990s, the books inspired Steves to write, produce and star in “guerilla” travel shows to some of his favorite European haunts. Now he is launching a radio show on NPR, drawing expertise from his guides and fellow travel writers, and questions from a sprawling e-mail list that would make most political candidates envious.
In the process, deliberately or not, he has created what can only be described as synergy. “In my business, nothing is viable on its own,” he says. “But because our books, our tours, our TV shows—and now our radio shows—have this complementary relationship, everything is profitable.”
This despite—and because of—the fact that Steves charges nothing to broadcast his television and radio shows, or attend many of his lectures and classes. “Because of this passion we have for overlapping and using our efficiencies, I can produce these cheaply and offer them to the whole country for free,” he explains, “and let quality information be my publicity stunt.”
Taking a stand
It’s not the only publicity he’s been generating lately. Over the past few years Steves has detoured from travel advice and become increasingly—some would say foolishly—outspoken on a litany of hot-button social and political issues: the war on terror, foreign policy, the shrinking social safety net, corporate greed. A devout Lutheran, Steves says his liberal ideology owes more to perspective than politics, and it has everything to do with his travels. “I voted for Ronald Reagan,” he recalls. “I used to be ‘My country, right or wrong.’ I used to be ‘Peace through strength.’ And then I traveled to Central America and changed my opinion.
“I’m a terrific capitalist, one of the best in my hometown. But I also spend a quarter of my life being challenged by Europeans, living out of a carry-on sized suitcase. That makes me sort of an odd duck, culturally.”
Steves says that such reflection is a fundamental consequence of travel, especially his style of modest, open-minded travel that deliberately distances oneself from the American way for a few weeks to achieve a different perspective. “It’s a notion that has become almost perverse in our society,” he says.
How has this controversial stance affected business? “Right off the bat, I don’t care,” Steves claims. “I make enough money that I’d rather be honest and make less, though my employees do get nervous when I get idealistic.
“From a practical standpoint, I’ve lost some people. On the other hand, I’ve been featured in The New York Times, 60 Minutes has filmed a segment on me, I have a column in USA Today. This is huge. And I don’t get this attention because I’m giving tips on how to get a frequent flyer upgrade to Mazatlan. I’m not playing the fun-in-the-sun game. Our mission has changed somewhat since 9/11. I’m talking about how travel broadens our perspectives and helps America fit better into this ever-smaller planet.”
Photography courtesy of Rick Steves’ Europe.
