 Profile
Hospitality and tourism mogul Stanley Tollman has been managing and creating hotels, restaurants, and travel operations for over six decades. A self-made entrepreneur, he went from helping out with the family's hotel and restaurant business to establishing a legacy of restaurants, hotels, and travel operations. As chairman of The Travel Corporation, Tollman oversees 25 premium companies including: Creative Holidays, Brendan Vacations, Contiki Holidays, Trafalgar Tours, and African Travel. These niche companies offer hotel accommodations, cruises, and tours whose common goal is to enrich the travel experience.
The Travel Corporation’s family of companies covers the niches of boutique hotels, transport, river cruising, independent travel, youth travel, and escorted touring. Customers range from solo travelers to couples, families, and groups. Stanley Tollman's company, in existence for more than four generations, has more than one million customers from five continents and sixty countries.
Stanley Tollman was born in Johannesburg and started helping his parents manage their hotel and restaurant when he was 19. The hands-on education he acquired during this time enabled him to develop a major chain of restaurants, hotels, and wine imports known as SA Empire.
Shortly after marrying, Stanley and his wife Bea, established a restaurant together called The Nugget Hotel, where Stanley took care of general operations and Bea worked in the kitchen, creating recipes as a self-taught culinary professional. The skills Stanley Tollman acquired during this endeavor would lead him to achieve his dream of creating a world-class restaurant, The Colony. During this time, he also established Tollman Towers Hotel, the first in Africa to be internationally considered as a top hotel and the tallest building on the continent. In addition to The Colony, which was frequented by celebrities, the couple also created two other restaurants, The Hydaway and The Contented Sole. Stanley Tollman and his wife also opened The Stable, the first discothèque in South Africa which attracted world-class performing artists and served as a venue for recording artists. He made his first million by the time he was 25 years old.
During the Yom Kippur War, Stanley Tollman lost his fortune in an unsuccessful investment endeavor, and then moved to the United Kingdom. There, he still owned a Hotel and a share of Trafalgar Tours, a travel company. By 1983, he was able to reclaim his family fortune through a string of successful investments. He continued these successful investments through the 1990s and further developed his greatest professional accomplishment, The Travel Corporation.
Now a Londoner, Stanley Tollman supports the preservation of South African wildlife and the 10,000-year-old rock paintings at Bushman’s Kloof. A patron of the arts, Stanley Tollman supports aspiring local artists through the Tollman Family Art Award. His philanthropic efforts also include a $50,000 donation to the New Zealand 2011 earthquake relief fund, made on behalf of The Travel Corporation. The entrepreneur holds an honorary degree from Schiller International University.
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