Running hotels, resorts, airlines and cruises, Thomas Cook has 600,000 customers on holiday, meaning governments and insurance companies could be forced to step in and bring them home if the company goes into administration.Unions and the opposition Labour party have urged the government to stump up the cash, but the foreign secretary appeared to dismiss that idea on Sunday.
Hurt by high levels of debt, online competition and geopolitical uncertainty, Thomas Cook needs to find another 200 million pounds on top of a 900 million pound package it had already agreed, to see it through the winter months when it needs to pay hotels for their summer services. The management team, led by Peter Fankhauser, met banks and bondholders at a London law firm on Sunday morning before a board meeting in the early evening to determine whether it can continue.Were Thomas Cook to fail, it would spark the biggest peacetime repatriation effort in British history.
An official from Germany said under that country’s rules, it would fall to insurance companies to help get customers home. The BBC reported that a hotel in Tunisia had asked Thomas Cook customers to pay additional sums in order to leave, for fear that the company would not be able to pay.