THOMAS COOK, a British travel agency, began life in July 1841 offering day trips to teetotallers between Leicester and Loughborough. In its heyday it counted Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling and Winston Churchill among its customers before evolving into a leading modern package-holiday firm. But its story ended ignominiously with holidaymakers being locked in a Tunisian hotel by security guards demanding that they pay again for their rooms if they wanted to go home.
What went wrong? Thomas Cook has earned most of its corn since the 1990s selling package holidays, which include some combination of flights, accommodation and food in one price. Since then the industry has often been presented as in decline, in part because of Thomas Cook’s woes. Monarch Airlines, a company that had specialised in package holidays, collapsed two years ago. New booking websites, such as Expedia and Skyscanner, enable travellers to book their own flights and accommodation.
Yet Thomas Cook’s woes are not a sign that package holidays are in decline; if anything, the industry is enjoying a resurgence. Half of Britons’ trips abroad are still part of packages, according to the Association of British Travel Agents, an industry group. The number of Britons going abroad on “inclusive tours” has risen from 14.3m in 2010 to 18.2m in 2018. It is still cheaper to buy a family holiday as a package than book the components individually.
New online-only travel agents, such as On the Beach and We Love Holidays, now Britain’s fourth- and fifth-biggest package-holiday operators, easily undercut Thomas Cook on price. A big bet on Tunisia as a destination just before a series of terrorist attacks that closed down the country’s industry, and a slowdown in holiday bookings last year due to good weather at home, did not help. The last straw was the £1.
How much did the chief exec get per year? How healthy is his private pension fund? Criminal prosecution looming after it cost the British tax payer approx £100 mil to repatriate holiday makers? Doubt it! There's something SO fundamentally wrong with this picture