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Thomas Cook’s demise isn’t just a disaster for consumers – the rest of the travel industry should be worried too

Changes in holiday habits and readily available cheap accommodation have put a strain on similar agents on the high street

Hamish McRae
Sunday 22 September 2019 18:06 BST
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Thomas Cook: Holidaymakers in Tunisia ‘told to pay again or they cannot leave’

The saga of Thomas Cook is a sad and miserable one – and an infuriating one for the hundreds of thousands of customers who are far away from their homes now that the company has collapsed.

What’s happened? Thomas Cook saw, in the dawn of the railway age, that people needed help to organise their travel. It was in 1841 that he got together 500 people for a railway trip from Leicester to Loughborough to go to a temperance rally. Other excursions including one to Scotland followed, but it was his son John who developed the idea of the package tour of continental Europe, where everything – tickets, hotels, trips to local sights – were included. Young aristocrats had done their grand tours of Europe, complete with their entourage and letters of introduction to the local British consul. The genius of Thomas Cook & Son was to create a service for ordinary people to experience what previously had been the privilege of the very rich.

It was a business model that has survived to this day, though the largest market for foreign travel now is the burgeoning Chinese middle class, eager to get a sight of the rest of the world, not northern Europeans who want a cheap week in the sun.

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