Thomas Cook was one of the biggest brands in the travel industry – until suddenly, it wasn’t.
The headline for this edition of ‘It Happened This Week’ is: ‘What do you say when a client asks, could the Thomas Cook situation happen here?’
A last-ditch effort to secure funding failed, and just like that, Thomas Cook, one of the oldest and best-known travel companies in the world, was out of business. The company’s fate had been in the balance for months and it needed an extra 200 million pounds, on top of a 900 million pound rescue package already received, to get it through.
It all played out on a September weekend, and on Monday, Sept. 23, Thomas Cook issued a statement. The company had gone into liquidation, stranding some 600,000 travellers in vacation destinations around the world.
The Canadian travel industry watched from the sidelines, no stranger to Thomas Cook but without any Thomas Cook-branded presence in this market for several years, after decades of dominance.
When it collapsed, the 178-year old company operated a fleet of 105 airline jets and had 555 travel agencies on major streets across Britain, and 200 hotels. The repatriation effort, dubbed ‘Operation Matterhorn’, ran until Oct. 6 with more than 1,000 flights in total. It was Britain’s biggest repatriation since World War II.
Did the headline appear in Travelweek in 1995, 2012 or 2019?
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