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Hangin' With ... Anthony Travel President & CEO John Anthony

John Anthony
JOHN ANTHONY is the president & CEO of Anthony Travel, a U.S.-based travel partner of more than 50 university athletic departments. Anthony Travel served as the official travel partner for college football games played in Ireland in '12 and '14 -- Notre Dame met Navy in '12, while the University of Central Florida played Penn State last year. It will also be the official travel partner of a recently announced '16 game between Atlantic Coast Conference schools Boston College and Georgia Tech. For that game, which will take place at Dublin's Aviva Stadium on September 3, 2016, Anthony Travel will also be involved in the management of the event. Anthony Travel and its partner in Ireland, Corporate.ie, are co-owners of Irish American Events, Ltd., which was formed to host the game and others in the future. Anthony spoke to SBD Global about the success of the '12 game between Notre Dame and Navy and how BC and GT were chosen as the teams for next year, among other topics.

On the game between Notre Dame and Navy in '12...
John Anthony: The 2012 Navy-Notre Dame game, I think in a way it's going to turn out to be life-changing for college football and certain countries, and the ability of college football to be played outside of the U.S. ... 35,000 Americans traveled to Ireland for that game. That, we were told, was the largest number of travelers for a sporting event to travel internationally, for a single event -- so not a multi-sport event like an Olympics or World Cup or something like that. ... The Irish Prime Minister said it was the largest movement of Americans to Ireland since World War II. It was pretty cool. The game was sold out six months before kickoff, which nobody would have ever expected. Everything just worked. For Ireland as a country, the economic impact was €85 million to €100 million.

On expectations for next year's game...
Anthony: It's hard to say anything could be bigger than that Notre Dame-Navy game was, just because of the volume of people. Thirty-five thousand went over, as a company we were responsible for over 10,000 of those people. ... For this one, we don't expect the same numbers, per se, but the level of involvement we have -- because we've contracted with Ticketmaster, we've contracted with a PR firm, we've contracted with the stadium -- is bigger than ever, just because of how deep we are to put on a game. ... We expect to sell it out, we sure hope to sell it out. There's a lot of excitement in Ireland. The announcement in Ireland was actually made by the Irish Prime Minister. He was followed up by the U.S. ambassador to Ireland. Then he was followed up by the Aer Lingus CEO. So we had the who's who of Irish government and politics and business all together for a couple hours that day, because Ireland gets it at this point. They see how important it is and how beneficial it is to their country. They've kind of self-proclaimed themselves the European home of American college football, and rightfully so.

On the logistical hurdles of coordinating int'l travel...
Anthony: The things that come to mind, there's various things, but one is just the things that are out of your control. Last year, the week of UCF-Penn State was the week of the volcanic eruptions going on in Iceland. The last time that volcano had erupted, air travel was shut off across most of Europe and from Europe to the U.S., it was shut down for close to a week. So all of a sudden, I'm following on Twitter a bunch of guys whose names have 17 letters in their last name, reading hourly Twitter posts about the status of these volcanoes, if they're going to blow or not and what the ash is doing. ... Another one is just the sheer volume. With that many people, you're going to have a little bit of everything. We've had a guest that has a heart attack. You've always got someone who had a family death occur back in the U.S. while they're over there. You get, on any given day, seven calls from people who left a sweater on a bus somewhere. It's impossible to overstate the level of activity in our command center, with just life happening.

On choosing Boston College and Georgia Tech...
Anthony: Boston College, who we had been in discussions with for over two years about it, they were interested because it matches up very well with their university for a number of reasons. Obviously Boston is the No. 1 Irish-American city there is. The affinity of Boston and the Irish is very clear. And Boston College itself, as a university, they have their own center right on St. Stephen's Green, right in the middle of Dublin. ... Credit to the ACC and Commissioner [John] Swofford because as a conference they are interested in doing more in Europe and so they were quick to say, "If we can make this a conference game, we'd love to." They -- I don't know who, between Boston College and the conference -- pretty quickly decided on Georgia Tech as a conference game. Georgia Tech was a willing opponent, they could move their game, from where it was originally going to be in the middle of the season, to the season opener. Everybody started working around re-arranging their schedules and then they said, "OK, if you can make it work, we've got an opponent and a date, let's do it."

Hangin' With runs each Friday in SBD Global.

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