Other facets of company’s diverse development

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33874, 20 June 1975, Page 11

Other facets of company’s diverse development

Six Union Company workshops in Australia and New Zealand employ more than 300 tradesmen and other employees to handle ship surveys, and repair and maintain ships from both the Union Line and other fleets.

Although there is naturally an emphasis on marine engineering, these workshops also take in general engineering and in Wellington, Nelson, and Dunedin, company workshops earn more than 50 per cent of their total income from work for other shipping companies and on non-ma-rine jobs. In Auckland this is not the case. 80 per cent of the work being on Union Company ships. Competition from other engineering workshops is present in nearly every, port in the country, so the Union Company has n\ade its workshops a separate division and requires it to contract for work on company vessels. “They do not just get all the. business handed to them on a plate.” says the branch manager, Mr D. Graham. “They have lost Union Company work in the past occasionally.” Sea freighters are being made at Port Chalmers and Nelson workshops, for example, but they are also being manufactured by n o n-company engineers elsewhere.

In Wellington, company workshops probably have the lion’s share of the marine engineering market. The shops handle most of the Union Company’s work in that port and most of the work on the rail ferries

and because these are the two biggest shipping groups in Wellington it is fair to say most of the work falls to them. Certainly the company does most of the marine engineering in Dunedin. Union Travel is probably the largest travel agency in the country, having sold s2om worth of tickets last year.

This travel division of the company has a staff of 175 and offices all over New Zealand, and at major Pacific Island destinations. These Pacific Islands offices give the company a servicing advantage. It has capitalised on this and made the Islands its speciality. it sells tours there at the moment to meet the travelling public’s requirements.

Although it does not at present operate any cruise ships itself, the company, operates shore excursions! for many of the big cruise lines and handles all the! shore trips P and O passengers make at Island ports.

An associated company in London is Pacific and World Travel Ltd, a New Zealand-based travel company which acts a agent f;or Union Travel a> I promotes business of iu own in England and the Continent.

Pacific and World Travel: is Union Travel’s “man in: London.” The company! which will arrange contacts for New Zealanders, in England who have travelled on tours arranged by: Union Travel.

The company has been, called Union Travel for the last 20 years, but in fact the Union Company has been in the travel business for all of its 100 years. It was carrying passengers in its first ships and arranging cruises to the sounds in the South Island’s Fiordland only a few years after its formation in 1875 and was producing travel brochures for Newmans coach tours when that company first got under way.