MMC Alum and Business Pioneer Gloria Bohan ’63, H’03 Recognized for 50 Years of Innovation

Gloria Bohan ’63, H’03

In 1972, Gloria Bohan ’63, H’03 started a small leisure agency, Omega World Travel, in a Fredericksburg, Virginia, storefront. At the time, she was a schoolteacher with a passion for cruises but no business training or industry experience.

Fast forward to today, and Omega World Travel is one of the country’s top women-owned companies, with $1 billion in annual sales and 200 offices around the globe. Omega turned 50 this year, and in September, it and Bohan were honored in a special edition of Travel Weekly commemorating the company’s anniversary and decades of innovation.

Though Bohan has long been recognized as an industry icon, she’s also had a significant impact on the philanthropic world, supporting community-based projects through the Dan and Gloria Bohan Foundation. What’s more, she has been an ardent supporter of MMC, where she served as a trustee from 2003-2013 and, in 2003, received an honorary degree.

Indeed, as President Kerry Walk, Ph.D., told Travel Weekly, Bohan established a scholarship at MMC in 2007 that has aided dozens of students from low-income backgrounds who would not have been able to attend college without the support.

“Gloria is a very serious philanthropist and is interested in making a difference in the lives of individuals and communities,” President Walk said. “She is interested in ensuring that as many people as possible have rewarding life experiences. That’s the work of Omega Travel, and that is the work of a college, to ensure that people have their lives enhanced by these experiences and are able to bring those experiences to everybody they meet and to all the situations in which they find themselves.”

Read more about Bohan’s story here.

Published: October 31, 2022