The Thomas Cook group, one of the world’s oldest travel agencies and a 178-year-old British company, closed on Monday.
At present, Thomas Cook has a debt of £1.7 billion, and his CEO, Peter Fankhauser, said the debt was “insurmountable” for the group. Until Sunday, Thomas Cook was still trying to get 200 million pounds through negotiations with creditors to keep it running, but the negotiations ended in failure, and the 100-year-old brand had no choice but to go into bankruptcy liquidation.
This decision will result in Thomas Cook being unemployed by more than 20,000 employees worldwide, affecting approximately 600,000 passengers, and a quarter of them are British tourists.
With so many tourists, how did Thomas Cook fall?
Thomas Cook was founded in 1841. As long as many people still don’t know what to travel, the company has begun to provide travellers with one-stop services ranging from flights to hotel reservations to local transportation and even dining. Operating a hotel and airline, it has built a good reputation among its visitors for its quality service.
▲ Image from: Forbes
The emergence of the Internet is considered to be the main reason for Thomas Cook’s decline. To be precise, it should be that it has not been able to embrace the Internet in time to make it abandoned by the times. Thomas Cook is still on the move as people become more accustomed to booking trips online, and OTAs are still stunned. Although the group announced its alliance with Expedia in 2017, most of its business still relies on offline outlets and telephones. It’s hard to say whether it’s arrogant or stubborn.
The diversified choices that OTA brings have lowered the threshold for people to travel freely, and the decline in interest in travel groups has further impacted Thomas Cook, who is a group tour.
