| Galapagos Odyssey |
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Page 3 of 4 
A two-master rocks gently in the waters of the Galápagos
Truth be told, Potter doesn’t completely identify with this crowd. Though his ascent to CEO-hood has made him at least as successful as most of our shipmates, his own background is unabashedly middle-class. The son of an Air Force officer, he was born at a U.S. base in France and spent his childhood years in the peripatetic fashion of military brats everywhere. In 1980, after his junior year of college, he took a job cleaning aircraft for an airline subcontractor for $7 an hour—and he never looked back. Over the course of a stunning career in aviation, he soared through the ranks, landing in 1995 as vice president of marketing at Frontier, one of the nation’s most admired small airlines. Only after he started there did he realize that the company was in bad financial shape. But thanks in part to Potter’s apt management and perseverance, Frontier not only survived, it thrived. By last year, the airline was beyond profitable, having grown to a fleet of 62 aircraft serving nearly 70 destinations and generating $1.5 billion in revenue. Around that time, a headhunter approached Potter about taking over the top spot at Exclusive Resorts. Though he wasn’t looking for a change, the airline exec opted for the new opportunity. The switch handed him both advantages and challenges. Exclusive Resorts serves just under 3,500 members, a fraction of Frontier’s customer base. That allows the company to lavish attention on each client. “We have a 95 percent approval rating,” Potter says. “Once someone joins, they don’t leave.” But Exclusive Resorts doesn’t have the name recognition of Frontier. “The company is still widely misunderstood—or not understood at all,” he says. “In the luxury-travel sector, less than 10 percent of the market is aware of us. So my primary focus is to get the word out and let people know, quite frankly, what they’re missing.” 
An endemic Nazca booby
From the top of the hill, we are rewarded with spectacular views over the ocean and across a channel to a neighboring island that was largely buried under a lava flow within the last few hundred years. To the west, a dark volcanic pinnacle rises dramatically above a white-sand beach that’s fringed with lush green vegetation. We return to the ship for breakfast, then come ashore once more, on the beach we spotted from above. Everyone dons snorkel, mask, and fins and hits the water. As I’m maneuvering around a jumble of boulders, I suddenly come face to face with a marine iguana. It’s swimming right toward me, undulating its tail like a mini alligator, and though it’s only about a foot and a half long, I instinctively recoil: It seems like just the sort of thing that might try to rip your face off for the hell of it. I hold my breath and remain very still as it swims within a foot of my mask, then bobs its head under the water and descends to the seafloor, where it gnaws on a knob of coral. Farther on, I spot a group of members treading water a few yards from a rock. I paddle over to join them and, raising my head out of the water, see that they’ve congregated around a small flock of penguins standing on the lip of an outcropping. The penguins shift their weight from foot to foot, seemingly as confused by us as we are that they should be here on the equator instead of in Antarctica. Then one plops into the water and swims away through the tangle of legs, flapping its wings in underwater flight. That night, I dine with Doug DeVries, a medical-equipment inventor from Washington State. I mention that I recently borrowed a small plane and used it to fly myself around California. “Oh, that sounds like fun,” he says, as if congratulating a small child for tying his shoes. Turns out DeVries’s hobby is buying and restoring antique planes and then flying them on traverses of places like Australia and Canada. For the rest of the meal, he regales me with the logistical details for his upcoming 10,000-mile seaplane jaunt in the Arctic. |
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