Alcohol-Free Tourism Finds a Niche Market

This week, the Carnival ship Fascination sets sail from San Juan on a seven-day Caribbean itinerary with about 2,000 passengers. But when the moment comes for toasting at the first shipboard dinner, at least 350 of those cruisers will be lifting alcohol-free glasses.

Those will be the travelers recruited by Sober Vacations International, a Westlake Village company that specializes in trips for recovering alcoholics. The company, run by a pair of brothers who accompany every trip themselves, may not be a threat to enter the Fortune 500 any time soon. But theirs is not the only group serving this niche in the market.

Sober Vacations International, telephone (800) SOBER-FUN or (818) 707-2111), organizer of the group on the Carnival ship, was founded in 1987 by Steve Abrams (a recovering alcoholic, sober now for 18 years) and brother Guy Grand (a recovering heroin addict, clean 12 years). They run four to six trips yearly and estimate that over the last 11 years, they’ve arranged 62 trips for about 10,000 traveling customers.

Surveys show that about 15% of their customers come from California, another 15% from New York and 8% each from Illinois and New Jersey. Singles account for 51%; the rest are couples or families.

Those on the Caribbean cruise are paying $799 and up per person (double occupancy, excluding air fare). Aside from the usual shipboard activities and port calls, its sober travelers will get their own chunk of the main dining room, a space for daily Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and a hospitality area with coffee and soft drinks.

At first, recalls Grand, he and his brother had trouble striking deals with big-name tourism companies. “But now, companies like Carnival Cruises or Club Med have found out we’re an easy group,” Grand says. “All we ask for, other than a normal trip, is a room for meetings.”

This is not to say that the world teems with sober travel specialists. Frequently, says Grand, “people start [running sober tours], and six months later, they realize this isn’t so easy. And they drop it.”

The result is a fairly small marketplace. Another modest company that has endured is Celebrate Life Tours, tel. (800) 825-4782 or (860) 688-7024, a Connecticut-based venture founded by Jack Wilbur in 1982. Wilbur said he also arranges about a dozen weekend trips on the East Coast yearly and three or four larger trips, usually designed to dovetail with AA conferences.

In Seattle, there’s OSAT (One Step at a Time), tel. (206) 236-9674, a sober outdoors club with the slogan “Keep climbing mountains and don’t slip.”

The group was founded in 1991 by Jim Hinkhouse, a climber with 12 years of sobriety. Now the group arranges retreats, trail work and climbs (20 to 30 events yearly) and stages traditional AA meetings in Northwestern outdoor settings--as many as four weekly, including a regular Sunday morning gathering atop Tiger Mountain, outside Issaquah, Wash.

These efforts continue despite the absence of the group’s founder. In May 1995, Hinkhouse was killed when a storm brought disaster to a Denali expedition.

Another source on alcohol-free matters, of course, is Alcoholics Anonymous itself, which has a local phone number in every major U.S. city (Internet https://www.aa.org). Since its founding in 1935, AA has grown into a global network with millions of members. The group remains resolutely noncommercial, but many members seize upon AA conferences and conventions as a chance to travel among like-minded companions; next year will offer a dramatic example.

The group holds a major convention every five years, and the next is set for June 29 to July 2, 2000, in Minneapolis, with main proceedings in the Hubert Humphrey Metrodome. At the last such gathering in 1995, an estimated 70,000 AA members joined in San Diego. (The convention center laid in 15,000 pounds of coffee and 100,000 packets of sugar for the occasion, and later estimated that the coffee flowed at a rate of 200 gallons per minute.)

After the Minneapolis convention, on July 2, 2000, Sober Vacations International has chartered the 225-cabin Grand American Queen for a six-day cruise down the Mississippi to St. Louis. Cost is $1,590 and up per person, double occupancy. By Jan. 5, about 200 of 450 openings were full.

Sober travelers may find further opportunities in the First Night movement. The trend arose in 1976, when a group of Boston boosters launched an effort to bring a little wholesome liveliness back to the city’s menacing downtown on New Year’s Eve.

“On New Year’s Eve, people were afraid of coming into Boston,” recalls Zeren Earls, who now serves as director of Boston-based First Night International (on the Internet: https://www.firstnightintl.org). Earls says First Night festival organizers conceived the ban on public drinking as a safety measure to reassure celebrants.

But as the success of the celebration shows, Earls notes, an alcohol-free night with family-friendly cultural offerings “appeals to all kinds of people.”

First Night International, a nonprofit international organization, sets guidelines for celebrations and advises communities on how to enlist cultural groups and win government support. The group says there are 202 cities in the U.S. and Canada with “First Night” events, plus Greenwich, England, and Hastings, New Zealand.

In California, San Diego, San Luis Obispo and Santa Cruz have First Night celebrations. Martinez, in the Bay Area, just staged its initial First Night, and Santa Barbara is expected to follow suit this December. Los Angeles and San Francisco are absent from the roster.

“It’s a bigger effort in major urban centers,” says Earls. “It’s easier for smaller communities to get motivated and get in touch with each other.”

Reynolds travels anonymously at the newspaper’s expense, accepting no special discounts or subsidized trips. He welcomes comments and suggestions, but cannot respond individually to letters and calls. Write Travel Insider, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053 or e-mail [email protected].