YOU'D think that at the age of 67, globe-trotting travel firm founder Albert See would be one world-weary guy by now.

The man has helped found three travel companies in his lifetime - household names C&E Tours, CTC Holidays and SA Tours, which was the subject of a messy internal dispute last year.

He has travelled the world's highways and byways more than most people in the course of doing business. But now, when men his age are working on their golf handicap, he has started up yet another travel firm.

The business, which began operating about 10 months ago, is called ASA Travel, which stands for Air Sino-Euro Associates Travel. But those who know the tireless go-getter reckon that it could just as easily stand for 'Albert See Again'.

Forty-three years of living out of a suitcase have not taken the romance out of travel for Mr See, apparently. There's just so much of the world to discover, and too little time to enjoy it all, says the bachelor.

The dispute at SA Tours (Sino-America Tours), which he founded in 1979, may have provided some push factor, too. He originally left the company in the 1980s but returned to it two years ago as managing director and chief executive.

But he left it again last year, saying only that 'things did not work out'.

According to newspaper reports, SA Tours was involved in a civil lawsuit involving two directors. In the end, the matter was settled out of court.

Mr See's life as a high-flier is a far cry from how he started out. In the early 1960s, the Malaysia-born, Chinese high-school graduate left his hometown of Kluang for Singapore to take night classes in Chinese shorthand and printing.

He set up a little business buying and selling stamps. Then in 1963, at age 24, three friends asked if he would like to pool his money with them to buy a year-old local travel agency called C&E Tours.

Undaunted by the fact that he knew nothing about the travel industry, he talked his father, who ran a coffee shop in Kluang, into loaning him $500, a princely sum in those days.

The business started modestly, hiring a few buses to ferry people to Malaysia and back. It expanded into Thailand and 'became an adventure', recalls Mr See. The C&E team would think of new destinations and check out the places themselves.

C&E expanded to launch flights to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Bangkok and Manila and opened branches around the world.

'I liked waking up in a different city every other month, meeting different people, seeing things I'd never seen before,' says Mr See.

This enthusiasm for new things led him to get C&E to offer mass wedding and honeymoon packages in the 1970s, the first agency to do so here, and which others were quick to copy.

'Mass weddings were unheard of then,' he laughs. 'Who would have thought of getting married together with a bunch of strangers, let alone going on a group honeymoon?'

In 1979, another group of friends asked if he would join them in setting up a new travel company. He agreed, and SA Tours was born.

The next five years were an extended joyride for him. 'You know how big countries like Australia have internal flights?' he asks. 'Well, we had our very own internal flight in 1981, when we chartered a plane to carry some passengers on an exclusive flight from the old Paya Lebar Airport to the newly opened Changi International Airport. We were the first flight to land at the new airport.'

But in 1989, the company was badly hit when Asian economies crashed. He ended up selling the company for just $1 to UIC, a public company with interests in property.

But the travel bug kept biting. A year or so later, he set up CTC Holidays, focusing on tours to China.

And now, together with his younger brother Jonathan and two other partners, he has invested $5 million in package-tour operator ASA Travel, which will have its official grand opening in People's Park Complex on July 9.

'Travel is my life and my wife,' says Mr See, who has never married and lives alone in a condominium in the East Coast. 'But why settle for travelling around the world on my own when I can bring the world to others?'