A talent for insubordination and standing alone enabled Sidney De Haan, who has died aged 83, to transform the British tourist industry by inventing Saga, the package holidays firm for older and retired people, in an era in which it was believed that only the pursuit of youth was the route to profit. He also introduced Saga magazine, which achieved a subscription circulation second only to the Reader's Digest.
De Haan revolutionised the holiday industry hardly less than Sir Billy Butlin and Sir Fred Pontin, who respectively pioneered holiday camps and villages. Far less flamboyant than Butlin, his sparky side survived the war. It was said - although the identity of the recipient is disputed - that De Haan, a useful boxer as a young man, once downed Butlin with a left hook after Sir Billy swore in front of his wife.
De Haan was born in Mile End, east London, one of the eight sons and three daughters of a shoe-factory foreman. He left school at 14, trained as a chef and worked at the Waldorf hotel. Called up in 1939, he joined the medical corps and was captured at Dunkirk. He was sent to a prisoner of war camp in Poland, spending extended periods in detention for insubordination. In 1943, he was chosen to escort sick repatriated prisoners back to Britain and, in a hospital in southern England, met his future wife Margery, a nurse.
In the immediate postwar period, traditional private hotels had a lean time. The De Haans had bought the 12-bedroom Rhodesia hotel at Folkestone, but, by autumn 1949, they were worried that they would have to close for the winter. Then, Margery De Haan noticed that most people on the town's park benches were elderly.
The idea of targeting retired people as holidaymakers was slow to catch on. De Haan's hotel charged only £6.50 a week for full board, on which travel agents could make little commission - so he devised his own marketing strategy. He worked out how far pensioners could comfortably travel in a coach, and decided that South Yorkshire was the area to aim at. He talked to Darby and Joan clubs and other groups in the district, as well as to householders on whose doors he knocked, about seaside holidays for £6.50 a week inclusive.
What had seemed unattractive to travel agents was highly appealing to pensioners. De Haan bought a second hotel, and soon other hoteliers wanted a piece of the action. Gradually, he became more of a tour operator, establishing Saga in 1951.
He chartered trains; he pioneered the use of university accommodation, left empty in vacations; he looked abroad with passport-free day trips to France and holidays in Portugal - he was one of the first to notice the possibilities of the Algarve. He took his trade behind the Iron Curtain to Romania and Yugoslavia, and, in 1978, when he floated the company on the stock market, it was the most over-subscribed offer of the year.
Since 1966, De Haan had been mailing a monthly newsletter to every customer, with news of upcoming holiday offers. In 1984, Saga magazine was relaunched as a thick, glossy, professional publication prepared to tackle any subject of interest to pensioners, as well as holidays. The magazine achieved a circulation of more than 1.2m, and sat, with Saga Insurance and Financial Services, at the centre of an organisation that had achieved international status while still based in Folkestone, its chairman an unpublicised figure with no place in the reference books.
De Haan retired as chairman of Saga in 1984, and was awarded the OBE the following year. His wife predeceased him in 1994; he is survived by three sons.
· Sidney De Haan, businessman, born February 6 1919; died February 16 2002
