Flying High in the Travel Business : Trips: The owner of Bird Enterprises pilots her own planes in search of clients. The firm’s volume is expected to increase 30% this year.

Margaret (Maggie) Bird, travel agent on the move, was talking on her cellular phone as she parked her Mercedes and headed for the runway at Oxnard Airport.

“Isn’t this awful?” she said, signing off and stuffing the phone into her shoulder bag. “I don’t know what I’d do without this thing. I’ve already used up two batteries today.”

As president of Port Hueneme-based Bird Enterprises, Bird is on the phone often, talking to the managers of the three travel agencies that she owns in Oxnard, Ventura and Port Hueneme.

And, as an experienced pilot, she does what she wants her customers to do--a great deal of traveling.

At least twice a week, Bird is in the air--no pun intended. Sometimes she travels on commercial airlines. More often, however, she’s piloting one of her two planes up and down the coast, drumming up business.

Much of Bird’s travel these days is in connection with a federal government contract that she won earlier this year, giving Bird Enterprises the exclusive right to provide flight, hotel and car rental reservations for federal employees in a seven-county area stretching from Ventura County to Monterey County.

“When we first got the contract, I was told it would amount to about $5 million in business over the next five years--if, that is, the General Services Administration is satisfied and renews us every year,” Bird said. “But it turned out that the award just gave us the right to do the business. We have to contact the people at the federal offices on our own to let them know who we are and what we can do for them.”

Bird isn’t complaining. She’s simply explaining why she often finds herself in places such as Santa Maria, San Luis Obispo and Goleta, leafing through the local phone book for offices of, say, the Internal Revenue Service, Social Security Administration or Bureau of Land Management.

Bird, who owns the three travel agencies under the umbrella of their parent company, Bird Enterprises, expects her total revenues to be considerably above $5 million this year. This, she said, makes Bird Enterprises the largest independently owned travel concern in Ventura County. Despite the recession, the firm’s volume is expected to increase 30% this year. Bird estimates that about 40% of her business is leisure travel, 35% corporate and 25% from the federal government contract.

Of the GSA contract, she said, “I’m beginning to get the hang of it now.” She not only expects to get considerably more than $5 million in federal business--of which Bird Enterprises will keep 10% in commissions--but she is applying for additional contracts to provide travel services at U.S. Air Force bases and other federal installations.

Bird, 46, has been on the move throughout her travel career. She got into the business in 1965, working as a reservations clerk for Trans World Airlines in downtown Los Angeles. She started her first agency, the Travel Mart (it’s still her flagship), on Channel Islands Boulevard in Port Hueneme, in 1973.

“The economy was strong in those days, and I did well immediately. But the airlines demanded that new agencies pay for all tickets in full on delivery. That meant that for three months, my one employee and I had to take turns driving to LAX every night to pick up our customers’ tickets. Fortunately, the airlines accepted our checks.”

Since then, Bird has not only established her credibility with the airlines, hotels and others in the travel industry, she’s bought a second agency, Esplanade World Travel in Oxnard, and started a third, Travel World/Cruise Mart in Ventura.

“The economy is starting to come back, and the air fare wars are attracting marginal leisure travelers--those who might or might not stay home, depending on the cost,” Bird said.

In general, however, the past two years have not been good for travel, she said. “Quite a few agencies in Ventura County and elsewhere have folded. Both leisure and business travel were hit heavily by the recession and fears of terrorism after the Persian Gulf War.”

In addition to obtaining the new government business, Bird said she has prospered by expanding and speeding up her service.

“The telephone is no longer the most efficient way to make travel arrangements. We install computers in our larger customers’ offices and teach them to order tickets directly from the airlines. We provide information about the best flights and fares available, but the clients are happy to save time by doing the rest.”

To further boost volume, Bird said she has come up with services that she can offer a client besides airline tickets, hotels and car rentals, among these: providing foreign currency exchange, translators, escorts for children and invalids, even arranging weddings in exotic locales.

Bird said these approaches have worked so well that, in contrast with rivals that are retrenching or merely holding their own, she is actively seeking new employees to add to her current staff of 20. “I always warn new employees, though, that there may be some glamour and free travel in this business, but travel agents can’t expect to get rich.”

She warns new staff members, too, that being a travel agent in Ventura County sometimes takes creativity. “You can’t just automatically book a client from this county on a flight that takes off or lands at L.A. International. You have to consider Burbank, Santa Barbara and other airports too.”

One of Bird’s business clients, Laura Van Rossum, office manager of the Western regional headquarters of La-Z-Boy Chair Co. in Ventura, said creativity only partly explains Bird’s success.

“She’s somebody you can depend on,” Van Rossum said, recalling the plight of one of her company’s salesmen, who was at a furniture market in High Point, N.C., when he learned that his grandmother had died.

“The funeral was the next day in Oklahoma City. Maggie got him there on time, which wasn’t easy. She also ordered flowers. And later, after the salesman and I had both been turned down flat, she got the airline to refund his ‘nonrefundable’ return ticket from North Carolina to L.A.”

Bird can be tenacious about getting her own money back too. Last week, after a year of legal wrangling, she won a Superior Court judgment ordering the Channel Islands Lions Club to reimburse $2,450 for a trip she’d financed for a golfer who shot a hole in one in a charity tournament. The club claimed that an insurance company refused to cover its loss. “That money belonged to my employees and my business, “ Bird said. “It was worth fighting for.”

Jan Butts, who serves as liaison between American Airlines’ Sabre travel information network and the travel industry on California’s central coast, says American categorizes Bird as a “racer,” a designation given to less than 20% of travel agents.

“Agencies in that group have a lot of potential and are expected to produce considerable new revenue every year,” Butts said. “Maggie is a very aggressive businesswoman. She doesn’t just wait around hoping for new business.”