Imperial History
Imperial Travel, an Indiana Corporation, a full service travel agency providing air, land, rail and sea transportation, as well as hotel, condominium, and rental car service, is headquartered in Lafayette, Indiana.
The forerunner of Imperial Travel, Imperial Enterprises, which was formed in 1961, sold school equipment and buses to Indiana School Corporations. Imperial Enterprises recognized the need of school administrators and school board members to attend national conventions throughout the United States. Imperial Enterprises chartered aircraft for these national conventions, throughout the decades of the sixties, the seventies, and the eighties. Imperial Travel was formed in 1974.
In 1969, Imperial Travel Service launched its Imperial Educational programs with an inaugural flight to Washington, D. C. The first trip consisted of 105 students. By 1999 over 90,000 students had toured the nation’s capital with Imperial Travel Service. This program proved so successful that it was commended in the United States Congressional Record in 1973–Imperial Travel Service is the only agency ever to have achieved this honor.
In the late sixties and early seventies, the school equipment business began to decline with the freeze on the tax base. In 1974, Imperial Enterprises looked to the future and decided to obtain its official status as a travel agency by obtaining ARC and IATAN appointments.
In 1981, Imperial Travel purchased its first new intercity motorcoach and began offering motorcoach charter transportation as an added service and as an adjunct to its travel services. In time the opportunity arose to offer tours to a growing base of young retired junior/senior citizens. In 1985, Imperial Travel established a sister corporation, Imperial Royal Tours.
Today, Imperial Royal Tours publishes a travel brochure containing tours by motorcoach, air, rail and sea. Our fleet consists of 10 motorcoaches, 5 limousines and are maintained at our own facility comprising five acres with a complement of mechanics and service personnel.
In 1987, Imperial Enterprises closed the school equipment portion of its business and concentrated exclusively on the travel business.
In 1987, Imperial bought their first new limousine to expand our limousine business. Since that time an 18/20 passenger Lincoln Navigator, 2 new Lincoln Continentals and an 18/20 passenger Hummer.
In 1989, Imperial Travel established the Imperial Travel Institute. We challenged our travel personnel to develop a course of study and a curriculum which would fully train travel consultants. Imperial Travel Institute was fully accredited by the Indiana Commission on Proprietary Education. Our course of study yielded credits towards a degree program at Purdue University and Ivy Tech. Imperial Travel Institute came to an end after September 11, 2001. Imperial motorcoaches can be seen everywhere and anywhere in the Continental U.S. and Canada. Imperial Travel is known and respected by people and companies throughout the entire Nation.
Imperial Travel is engaged in a service industry and the product is unique only in terms of how imaginative we become in delivering to our client a product that is readily available to all our competitors. In a single word the industry describes this as service and since service to the customer is what Imperial is all about we have adopted this word as a part of our name, Imperial Travel Service.