The notion of getting on an aircraft for fun has, in 2008, gone the way of the Short Empire and the de Havilland Comet . . . into aviation history. But by the time he was 18 Roger Allard reckons he had flown to Majorca alone 100 times - there and back in a day.

This was the late 1960s, and Mr Allard was a teenager working Saturdays in a Tottenham Court Road travel agent. The flights on Sundays were free, because the aircraft were little used. “In those days you were a kid at school, and you would go to Majorca for lunch, like other kids could go trainspotting or whatever,” he says.

At 18, in 1973, he left to set up, with six colleagues, Owners Abroad, which grew from humble beginnings as a broker of airline seats to become the country's second-biggest package tour operator. It seems an astonishingly early age to set up as an entrepreneur, but Mr Allard always knew that this was what he would do. “The industry at the time was my hobby. There's nothing greater than making a living out of it.”

Nowadays he is well into his second quoted company. All Leisure, which he chairs, provides upmarket cruises mainly to the over-55s. Owners Abroad is now First Choice Holidays, part of the TUI travel group.

The intervening three and a half decades are littered with the wreckage of airlines and holiday operators. Entrepreneurs such as Freddie Laker and Harry Goodman have set up to cater for the public's growing demand for a holiday in the sun and come to grief during one of the periodic downturns sparked by economic hardship or war.

Travel and holidays are the ultimate discretionary purchase, one of the first items on the household budget to be cut. But Mr Allard has steered a careful course through those years, often by capitalising on the woes of his competitors, buying stricken businesses for a song. In the 1970s the holiday business was a game of two halves. You made your money in the summer and you lost money in the winter. If the first sum exceeded the second, you reported a profit.

Owners expanded in the broking business, acting for the big charter airlines and selling unused seats to members of the public who were not on package tours. The company floated on the Unlisted Securities Market, the forerunner to today's Alternative Investment Market, in 1982.

A year later Mr Allard and his colleagues bought their first tour operator, adding a string of more distressed firms for nominal amounts over the next few years. They moved into the Canadian market, flying “snowbirds” to Mexico or the Caribbean for the winter. This broke the seasonal boom-bust holiday cycle by finding a market for the aircraft when they had previously not been much needed.

Mr Allard became managing director in 1988, and two years later Owners became the UK's third-largest tour operator by buying the unprofitable Redwing Holidays, which included brands such as Sovereign and Sun Med, from British Airways.

“BA paid us £6million to take it away,” he recalls. These were the days when Lord King of Wartnaby was attempting to impose some discipline on the unwieldy national carrier. A colleague of the aforementioned Harry Goodman, then running his Intasun empire, was in the habit of turning up to BA annual meetings and teasing the chairman about the losses on the holidays side. As anyone who can remember him will attest, Lord King did not take kindly to being teased, and when the sale came around, Intasun was not on the list of preferred bidders.

“There was only Crossland and ourselves,” Mr Allard says. David Crossland, probably the greatest holiday entrepreneur the UK has seen, and his Airtours were then at their height. Then came Gulf War One. Intasun went bust. “We were the second-largest tour operator,” says Mr Allard, who, as vice-chairman of the travel industry trade body TOSG, now the Federation of Tour Operators, was charged with the task of bringing back the 30,000 holidaymakers stranded by the collapse. “It's the first time I've had a blank cheque in my hand in my life - and the last,” he says with a laugh.

He says that tour companies over-expand, overtrade and come to grief. “I'm not interested in size. I'm interested in profitability.”

The war was tough for the travel industry, although Owners Abroad was better placed than most as, rather than owning all the aircraft, it contracted in a large proportion from charter airlines, and these could easily be chopped as demand fell. In 1993 came the break with the company he had set up. “I wanted to move on by the time I was 40,” Mr Allard says. But he had, in fact, disagreed with the rest of the board, led by Howard Klein, the chairman, over a hostile £290 million bid for the company from Crossland and Airtours. This was defeated.

Mr Allard thought the two businesses should have merged - at the right price. “I didn't fall out with the board - far from it,” he insists. He left in December, took a six-month sabbatical, and started the All Leisure Group, mainly dealing in charter aircraft. In 1996 he sold the business to the Irish airline Transaer. His company had owned an outfit called Voyages of Discovery, which specialised in student school cruises. Mr Allard spent a time scrabbling around with other leisure interests such as hotels, pubs and restaurants with mixed success, blocked from his first love, travel, by restrictive covenants imposed at the time of the sale.

In 1997 he was offered the Discovery business, which had fallen on hard times, for £1. This and sundry other ventures came back under the All Leisure umbrella by the turn of the decade, and the company was floated on AIM last October, valued at £110.5million. It owns the cruise ship Discovery and rents a second, Minerva. A third is being sought. “Cruising is more interesting than aviation,” Mr Allard says. “It's not about going along to Mr Boeing or Mr Airbus and saying, can I buy 100 planes, please.” The assets are rarer, and you have to be very choosy. Discovery itself, a 700-berth vessel, had been chartered by Mr Allard before he actually bought it for $28million in 2005.

All Leisure owns the Discovery brand. A second, Swan Hellenic, was bought from Lord Sterling of Plaistow, the former P&O boss and another man with travel in his blood, who is a substantial shareholder as a result. A third, Discover Egypt, operates Nile cruises. His customer base is 55-plus and wealthy. They are the Ski generation - as in “Spend the Kids' Inheritance”. Mr Allard says: “They are people who want to come and learn. Our customer base never had a gap year. Their children have left home. As long as they and the grandchildren are OK, they will go and spend it. They don't want to leave it to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. And they don't want to lie in the sun.”

In this way he distinguishes his company from the archetypal over- 50s cruise, the Saga holiday. His ships do not operate in the Mediterranean in the hottest months, although there are trips to Istanbul, or the former Roman colony of Leptis Magna in Libya, once it is cooler. They go to Greenland, Antarctica, the Amazon, the Baltic and, from last month, the Danube and the Rhône. “They want to mix with like-minded people. We don't do kids - not under 11.” There are visiting lecturers, such as Richard Sabin, dolphin and whale expert at the Natural History Museum.

Mr Allard lives on his own off the Kings Road and spends up to a third of every month abroad. When we meet, he is just back from Cambodia, an unthinkable destination 30 years ago but now a serious prospect, along with Vietnam. His customers are the first generation to be able to take advantage of these new frontiers for tourism. “They retire earlier, they're fitter, they've got more money - and they want to explore.”

CV Roger Allard:

Born: 1954

1973 Set up Owners Abroad

1982 Floated Owners on USM

1985 Full listing for Owners

1993 Left Owners after dispute over strategy

1994 Started the All Leisure Group

1997 Bought Voyages of Discovery

October 2007 Floated All Leisure on AIM

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