Credit: Venturesome Trip

CREDIT Venturesome TripFor a number of years after the Diners’ Club was founded in 1950, it reigned as the leader in the fledgling credit-card business — only to lose the title when American Express Co., a giant in the travel-services field, came out with an all-purpose card of its own.

Undaunted, the Diners’ Club is now broadening the competition with its bigger rival by moving directly into the travel business itself.

It is an ambitious venture. In 1966 the Diners’ Club started an automobile club-style travel information service, the Wayfarers Club, whose membership has grown steadily to more than 90,000. It later acquired a small, Mississippi-based travel service, now called Reservations World, which is being expanded to pro vide tourists and travel agents with com puterized, one-stop reservation-processing for worldwide hotel and transportation accommodations. Last fall, in the biggest undertaking of all, the Diners’ Club paid out $5,000,000 to acquire Fugazy Travel Bureau, the third largest travel agency in the U.S., after Amer ican Express and Thos. Cook & Son.

A Misnomer. Such diversification is the handiwork of President Alfred S.

Bloomingdale, 5 1 , himself an inveterate traveler who thinks nothing of commuting between his California home and the Diners’ Club Manhattan headquarters. The grandson of the founder of Bloomingdale’s department store in New York City, he played tackle on the Brown University football team and after graduation in 1938 went to work for his grandfather’s old store. Finding little satisfaction in a business no longer owned but still heavily influenced by his family (“You can’t get fired that way”), he quit within a year to go into show business. Over the next few years, he was both a theatrical agent (among his clients: ludy Holliday, Frank Sinatra) and producer for such Broad way shows as the Ziegfeld Follies of 1943.

After a stint producing movies in Hollywood, Bloomingdale drifted off into other business, including a venture that developed a lint-free wiping cloth. Then he and two colleagues pooled $18,000 to launch the Diners’ Club, which started off by enticing 14 Manhattan restaurants to honor its credit cards. The club quickly became a success — and its name a misnomer — as hotels, gas stations, car-rental agencies and a host of other business establishments signed on.

Today, the Diners’ Club is flourishing along with the rest of the credit-card industry. With annual billings of $700 million, it stands behind American Express (over $1 billion) and ahead of third-ranking Carte Blanche ($135 million) among so-called “travel and entertainment” card systems. Also stepping up the nation’s credit-card spree are banking institutions, led by California’s Bank of America, whose highly successful BankAmericard enjoys annual billings of $458.9 million. For all the competition, the Diners’ Club achieved profits during fiscal 1967 of $2,500,000, a 21% increase over the previous year. With its cards now honored in 137 countries, including Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, the club also receives revenues from franchised operations abroad.

Stretching the Imagination. As part of his recent diversification drive, Bloomingdale has gone into a number of new fields directly related to credit. Through acquisition, he has set up National Account Systems, a group of collection agencies that handles overdue accounts for banks and retailers as well as for the club itself. Another new subsidiary is Financial Services Inc., a two-year-old data-processing firm established to provide credit checks for various businesses.

It is the burgeoning travel business that shapes up as the most lucrative sideline. Bloomingdale is especially enthusiastic about his newly named Diners/ Fugazy subsidiary, which has 75 offices around the world. Surveying the $60 billion-a-year travel industry as a whole, he is understandably unhappy about the Johnson Administration’s proposals to tax overseas travel; nonetheless, he envisions great growth in the future. .”It stretches the imagination,” says the man from the Diners’ Club, “to try to conceive of what the travel business can become.”