Coming in From the Cold.

Peruvian travel pioneer glides from ethnic to electronic market.

MORE THAN ANYTHING, GERARDO Concas remembers the weather

Recalling his arrival in New York--then a 19-year-old on his first adventure outside Peru--Concas relied on his limeno weather skills in the United States' biggest city. "In Lima, as long as the sun's out, you know it's warm," recalls the now 54-year-old businessman. "I looked out the window in New York, the sun was shining and I went outside without a coat."

It was a frigid day in March.

Concas now laughs at the meteorological miscalculation, and well he might: it was a rare misstep in an otherwise stellar career. The Peruvian was one of the first people to recognize an untapped niche in the U.S. travel market--Spanish-speaking immigrants interested in vacationing in their homelands. A pioneer in what industry folks call "ethnic travel," Concas has snapped up a long roster of high-volume travel agencies and currently reigns as the top seller of continental Airline tickets to Latin America.

"If you give a Peruvian the tools, he or she can do anything. But when I was growing up, Peru was a country without tools," says Concas, president of Costamar Travel, Cruise and Tours.

Over the years, Concas has turned an airline ticket office operating out of his father-in-law's New Jersey jewelry shop into a travel network spread over two continents. By consolidating airline tickets, hotel rooms and cruiseship cabins--buying in volume to resell to his clients--he has left competitors struggling to undercut him.

Costamar now operates 55 travel outlets, including an agency in Ecuador, one in Los Angeles that opened in May and three offices in Concas' home country-- with plans to open seven more in Peru. In December 1999, Costamar debuted an office in Bogota, Colombia--just three months after buying a Brazilian travel network based in Rio de Janeiro, with links to 600 agents and US$40 million in gross sales annually. Continental is relying on Concas to help the carrier gain some ground in Brazil, where it has been struggling.

While Concas embraced U.S. business savvy, he has held fast to his South American roots. He married a Peruvian, raised his two children to fluently speak, read and write Spanish, and returns frequently to his homeland. At dinner time in the Concas South Florida home, the savory aroma of the Peruvian stir-fried beef dish, lorno saltado, wafts from the kitchen.

"People had been talldng about this Peruvian who had several travel agencies in New York and New Jersey. What most impressed me was how well organized he is," says Federico Perez, president of Miami-based South America Travel Net, an Internet company that markets Latin American destinations and operators.

Jim Stevens, staff vice president of international revenue and pricing management for Continental Airlines, calls Concas a stickler for detail. "He even knows what his sales are on a daily basis," Stevens says.

Concas is the carrier's single biggest seller of tickets to Latin America, racking up $37 million in sales last year. Even at that, Continental accounts for less than a third of Concas' ticket gross of $130 million annually, a figure he expects to boost to $150 million this year.

When Concas finished high school and couldn't find a job, he scrapped plans to become a professional musician and headed to the United States. He studied English at night and worked the day shift at a factory that imported belts from Japan and Europe.

"That's where I learned the American way of distribution. They had warehouses all over the place," says Concas, who started as a stock boy and ended up as warehouse manager. Another company hired him to spearhead exports to Latin America. "We started at zero and I took the company to $3 million in exports in two years," Concas says.

He then began thinking about the South and Central American immigrants who saved money to vacation in their homelands. "I realized that people who speak Spanish traveled, but they didn't have travel agencies that targeted them." In 1980, he opened a small Spanish-language travel agency in his father-in-law's shop. The first month he sold one ticket, earning a commission of $12.45. Within a few years, Concas and his wife Violeta were grossing $80,000 a year.

The company expanded from New York to Latin America, and Concas and Violeta left frigid New York winters behind and moved to Florida. Violeta has spun off CTM Tours, offering vacation packages to Latin America and Europe.

Now Concas envisions a new service: cyber travel cafes. At the cafes, he says, travel-hungry consumers can sit at computers and tap out their ideal travel packages. Agents on site help fine-tune the itineraries, then collect the cyber travel commission. Concas, who is testing the cafes on a pilot basis, provides the airline tickets.

"The future will be paperless travel agencies:' says Concas. "And the window of opportunity is now."