Is This Any Way to Run a Family?

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"Did you hear that?" asked Tom. "Did you hear what he said?"

"The stupidest thing you could ever do"

Several times a week, Tom Parsons wakes up before the sun, checks the latest tremors rattling the air travel landscape, then awaits a call from a radio jock in Cleveland or Fort Lauderdale or San Francisco. In a given week, he might do 35 radio and TV spots and talk to a couple dozen reporters. He may be the most quoted authority on airfares today, a fact that has allowed him to build his business with very little paid advertising at all--a happy if unanticipated turn of events that began one day in the late 1980s with a surprise call from Tom Snyder's radio show.

Parsons is something of an accidental entrepreneur. He was in charge of loss prevention at Pier 1 Imports in Fort Worth, Texas, in the early 1980s when he began to investigate the mysteries of plane ticket pricing. The company was paying double and triple bonuses to employees who found ways to save money; Parsons had street smarts, an ability to work the angles, to find the weaknesses in the system and--"within the law and within the rules"--exploit them. "I've always been a conniver," he said more than once, quick to add that he did not consider the term pejorative.

He quickly broke the airlines' code. By now, most people have heard of "hidden city" and "back-to-back" ticketing. A traveler uses the first to cut the cost of flying to an expensive hub like Chicago by booking a cheaper flight to a destination beyond, and then not boarding the connecting flight at O'Hare, a scheme the airlines have effectively blocked with advanced reservation systems. The latter trades a pricey midweek roundtrip for two discounted weekend-stay itineraries, one from the origin and one from the destination; the return coupons are discarded. Parsons claims to have named and popularized these ploys. His tip sheet "saved the company a ton," says Robert Camp, Pier 1's president at the time. (Parsons says he cut the firm's travel expenses by $800,000 in 14 months, almost a third of the budget.) Soon he was distributing the tip sheet to friends of the company and friends of friends. Best Fares was born as a side project to his day job, midwifed with $1,000 in seed money. Before long he expanded his purview from DFW to all of the big Texas airports and then to the whole country.

This was, of course, back before the Internet made low fares accessible to everyone, back when finding the cheapest seats required a sort of alchemy. Over the years, Best Fares added proprietary contracts with the airlines (carriers that at first feared Parsons learned to work with him), cruise lines, and tour operators; then came a reservation center. By the mid-1990s, he had 60,000 subscribers, all willing to pay $59.95 a year for his monthly magazine. That's when Best Fares really took off, fueled by explosive growth in leisure travel and by the Internet's do-it-yourself ethic. By 2000, membership in Best Fares had reached 159,000, and revenue had soared to at least $12 million. In recent years, the dividends for his family have been tangible--the condo in Clearwater, Fla., lavish trips, season tickets to the Texas Rangers. And Parsons and Jean, his wife of six years, were building an 11,000-square-foot home, a confected French manor (steep gables outside, wood stained dark, and high broad arches inside) that has a distinctly medieval character, notwithstanding the Mexican-tile pool out back.

Yet as is so often the case with men who try to nurture a business and a family simultaneously, it was work that got the larger share of Parsons's attention. (He has three children; the oldest, Stephanie, is 31.) Even before starting Best Fares, he put in long hours, and the new company had only aggravated the imbalance. This exacerbated--or perhaps was the product of--tensions with his first wife, the mother of his kids. Parsons finally quit Pier 1 in the late '80s. The couple divorced in 1994. "My ex-wife never wanted me to leave Pier 1, okay?" Tom said. "She said, 'This is the stupidest thing you could ever do." Now his adult children--particularly Michael--cause Parsons a certain amount of grief, which he attributes, in part, to his absence from their childhoods.

I met Michael at a Rangers game one night with Tom and Bryan. The bill of his baseball cap shrouded an impishly handsome face, bristly with stubble. He dissected the team's fielding and hitting with authority. A man hawking beer climbed toward us, and Michael's eyes lit up. "Dad, buy me a beer," he said. When this got no reaction, he said it again.

"Why do you want me to buy you a beer?" Parsons asked. He was grinning.

"Why do you think?" retorted Michael, grinning back. Recently, Tom had given his oldest son a new Jetta; eventually, after Michael ignored the many tickets he accumulated, Parsons had to bail his kid out of jail. He ordered the beer.

"Michael probably got left out," Parsons told me later. "He also watched me, you know, push the system. But the kid never realized that I worked, sometimes three to four jobs." Parsons credits his military service with forcing discipline upon him, and he empathizes with his boy. "I see a lot of me in Michael," he admitted. "That's probably why I sort of give him breaks."

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