Obituary: Vladimir Raitz

Born into a middle class Jewish family in Moscow in 1922, in 1928 he emigrated with his mother, a dentist, to Berlin where her parents had fled, leaving behind his father, a doctor, whom he would never see again. His mother remarried and they moved with her second husband to Warsaw. His stepfather was one of the Polish officers murdered at Katyn.

Raitz arrived in London in 1936 speaking Russian, Polish,  French and German, but no English. After graduating from the London School of Economics, where he read history, he joined Reuters in 1943 and monitored foreign news broadcasts. He was still working for Reuters when, in 1949, his grandmother died, leaving him £3,000. He left the agency, using his inheritance to establish Horizon Holidays with an office in Fleet Street. He had the idea when staying with a baron in Corsica.

On Horizon’s first trip to Corsica in 1950 holidaymakers paid £32 10s all-inclusive for a six-hour flight aboard a government-surplus Dakota DC3 to a holiday in the sun with a canvas tent on the beach, "delicious meat-filled meals and as much local wine as [you] could put away". At first he was permitted to carry only teachers and students – other occupations were banned – who could take only £50. 

Raitz knew he had started a social revolution, not only giving the man in the street holidays abroad but also making him more cosmopolitan, broadening his mind and his palate with a taste for wine and foreign food.

In 1970 he invented Club 18-30 which under subsequent ownership became a byword for booze and sex in the sun.

Horizon Holidays, battered by the oil price shocks, folded in 1974. Raitz remained one of the principal players in the British tour operating business for 25 years, acquiring Skytours and Riviera Holidays on behalf of the Thomson organisation to form Thomson Holidays.

Raitz was always a proud Muscovite with a fondness for vodka and Russian songs, a ready laugh “and a stubborn urge to organise”. He was co-author, with Roger Bray, of Flight to The Sun: the Story of the Holiday Revolution, published in 2001.

Raitz died on 31 August. ■