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Thomas Cook History: The Tale of the Father of Modern Tourism

Last updated: March 21, 2021 - Written by Jessica Norah 42 Comments

Do you know who Thomas Cook was and what contribution he made to the history of travel? Perhaps you have heard the name, seen it on the travel agencies that still carry his name, or maybe you’ve even taken a Thomas Cook tour. But my guess is that, like me, you don’t know too much about the man or how he fits into the history of travel.

Thomas Cook was a passionate man who was born into a world where most working class people worked long 6-day weeks and never traveled more than 20 miles from their home towns. Thomas would begin work at age 10, laboring in a vegetable garden for 1 penny per day; but with a lot of determination and hard work, this working class man would eventually build one of the largest travel companies in the world.

This post is dedicated to the memory of Thomas Cook and his role in history and will give you a good overview of Thomas the man, Thomas the travel pioneer, and a glimpse of what it was like to travel in the Victorian age.

Table of Contents:

Who was Thomas Cook?

Thomas Cook was born in 1808 in the small town of Melbourne, England but would be best known for his time living in Leicester. He would finish his schooling at age 10 to begin working, often for only a penny a day, to help support his family.

Throughout his life, Thomas Cook would work as a Baptist preacher, carpenter, furniture maker, printer, publisher, political advocate, and travel organizer. As a Baptist preacher, he would walk thousands of miles and earned so little that he often worked in the dark to conserve candles and oil.

After seeing the effects of drunkenness at an early age, Cook believed that alcohol abuse was one of the major roots of the many social problems in the Victoria era and would spend much of his time and talents supporting the Temperance movement in England for the rest of his life. In fact, Cook’s beginnings as a travel organizer would come about because of his temperance beliefs.

In 1841, he would arrange for a special train to take over 500 people from Leicester to Loughborough to attend a temperance meeting. For 1 shilling, passengers got round trip train travel, band entertainment, afternoon tea, and food. Not a bad deal!

T he Birth of Thomas Cook & Son

Then in 1845, he would organize his first railway excursion for profit, and the following year he would begin offering trips outside England to Scotland, a country that captivated Cook and would remain one of his favorite destinations. For many of his early passengers, this was their first time aboard a train and the furthest distance they’d ever traveled from their home.

His trips kept getting bigger and in 1851, Thomas got the chance to organize railway travel and travel accommodations for people from the provinces to travel to London to attend the Great Exhibition orchestrated by Prince Albert. Thomas would transport over 150,000 people to London during the 6 months of the exhibition. This was one of the largest events in England and one of the largest movements of people within Britain!

Up until this point in time, most people in the provinces would be unlikely to travel to a town 20 miles away, let alone to the city of London. It must have been quite a shock for many people, who likely had never attended an event bigger than a county agricultural fair, to witness the Great Exhibition, where many of the greatest industrial inventions of the time were on display, in the bustling capital city of London.

His early tours would be marketed towards the working class, but later his company would go on to escort more middle class passengers and even organize travel for royalty, the military, and other important figures given his increasing reputation for being able to efficiently organize travel.

Interestingly, a large percentage of Cook’s travelers would be single or unescorted women who likely would not have been able to travel on their own (remember these are the days of Gone with the Wind ), but being part of an escorted tour provided them with both protection and independence.

Cook would rapidly expand operations, escorting tours throughout Europe, North America, and even led the first commercial tour around the world. But perhaps no destination was more sacred to Thomas than his tours to Egypt and the Middle East. Here Thomas could witness firsthand the Biblical lands he had read and preached about all his life, and spending time in the Holy Land was truly a realization of many of his dreams as a young man.

A Man with Many Personal Obstacles and Struggles

Although Thomas Cook & Son would thrive and go on to become one of the largest travel agencies in the world, things did not work out as well for Cook in his personal life. Thomas’ father died when he was very young as did his stepfather, and young Thomas was left to be raised by his widowed mother.

As an adult, he would suffer the tragic sudden death of his only daughter Annie—a young woman on the cusp of marriage—who shared a close relationship with her parents. Thomas’ wife would suffer a long period of ill health following her daughter’s death, eventually dying and leaving Thomas alone with his own failing health that left him almost blind.

In his later years, he had a very strained relationship with his only son and business partner John Mason Cook. Thomas felt that he was being pushed aside in his own company and eventually John Mason Cook would take over all operations from his father. The father and son never truly reconciled and spent very little time together towards the end of his life.

While Thomas’ poor health and eyesight made it increasingly difficult, he continued to be active in travel and temperance activities until near the end of his life. His son would continue to expand the travel business.

What was it like to Travel During the Victorian Era?

Thomas lived during the reign of Queen Victoria—the Victorian era—and while romantic imaginings of spending time aboard the famous Oriental Express, sailing on luxury White Star Line steamships, and staying in grand palatial hotels may have been partially true of the wealthiest of travelers, these are far from the accommodations you could expect as a working class or middle class traveler.

Before widespread railway transport, the stagecoach reigned as the quickest way to get around and only the wealthy could afford such conveniences. So poorer people often walked, hitched rides on the back of wagons and carts, or, if lucky, rode a horse or donkey. In the early days of railway travel, third class train accommodations were open wagons, some without seats, where passengers would have to worry about the wind, sun, dust, locomotive smoke, and glowing hot embers.

During Cook’s travels—particularly his early trips—you would need to worry about germs and disease as very little was understood about germs at the time and the lack of widespread refrigeration and hot water heightened the chances of disease. Restaurants, flush toilets, and even running water were not staples in Great Britain, let alone the rest of the world. Communication was slow and done primarily by postal mail, sometimes taking weeks to confirm reservations or transmit a message back home.

However, things were not all bad. During Thomas’s life so much would change that would make travel faster, cheaper, and more comfortable than ever before. Improvements in the postal service, use of the steam engine, opening of the Suez canal, and the great expansion of the railways would make it possible for Thomas Cook to accomplish things that would not have been possible a generation before him.

Thomas Cook’s tours, with their discounted organized group rates, made it possible for a lot of working and middle class people to travel for the first time.  Cook believed that travel could help educate and enlighten people who, like him, often did not have a proper school education, eliminate prejudices and bigotry, and be a healthy leisure alternative to visiting pubs, gambling halls, and whorehouses.

However, these new travel opportunities for the lower classes was not something that was widely appreciated by many of those in the upper classes of society. Until the nineteenth century, popular tourist destinations were almost exclusively the playground of the wealthy who could afford the time away and expensive cost of travel. The upper classes did not want to mix with the lower classes when traveling.

As Thomas Cook and others began to offer affordable excursion tours to popular destinations such as English country homes (e.g., Chatsworth House), the Rhine River valley, the French Riviera, Egyptian pyramids, and the Swiss Alps, wealthy travelers complained about what they saw as a bunch of uncouth, uneducated common people invading their exclusive travel paradises.

They criticized Thomas Cook and the excursion travelers, and this criticism likely wounded Thomas, who although he strongly believed in the right for all people to be able to travel, he also strived to be accepted by the upper echelons of society. Despite his success, he never was accepted by the upper classes as he was not of gentle birth, but was a working man and a Baptist in a country still largely controlled by wealthy Anglicans.

However, despite all the criticism, the demand for discounted organized travel would only continue to increase. The number of travelers from London who crossed the Channel to continental Europe rose from 165,000 in 1850 to 951,000 by 1899. Travel agencies and organized travel were here to stay.

Why Thomas Cook was a Travel Pioneer

Thomas Cook was a travel pioneer who built one of the largest travel businesses in the world, a business that started very humbly as a way to transport travelers to nearby temperance meetings. Thomas was able to “organize travel as it was never organized before” and with the help of the railways and the steam engine, he was able to do it on a scale that would have never before been possible.

Although not the first to come up with most of the ideas, Thomas would make things like travel vouchers, traveler’s cheques, and printed guidebooks common and widespread. Cook would use his talents as a printer to print travel advertisements, bulletins, magazines, guidebooks, and train timetables.  In fact, Thomas Cook Continental Timetables would be published from 1873 to 2013 (last edition was published in August 2013) and were for many decades considered the bible for European train travelers.

His religious fervor would make him seek out exotic locations such as the Middle East and his determination would lead to Thomas Cook & Son opening offices around the world. Perhaps his greatest legacy is that he helped make it possible for a new group of people to engage in leisure travel. Cook understood well the drudgery of hard work and trying to support oneself on a meager income, and his tours provided working and lower middle class people the opportunity to explore a world they could have only have read about otherwise.

The Thomas Cook & Son name continued to exist as a travel company, offering travel tours until 2019. The company traded for 178 years. But it had not been a family-run business by the Cook family since the 1920’s when Thomas Cook’s grandsons, Frank and Ernest, sold the company to the Belgian Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits et des Grands Express Européens, operators of most of Europe’s luxury sleeping cars, including the Orient Express .

In the 1940’s it would become state-owned by the British Transport Holding Company. It would continue to change hands over the years. In 2001, it would become owned solely by C&N Touristic AG, one of Germany’s largest travel groups, who renamed the company, Thomas Cook AG.

Thomas Cook became one of the world’s largest travel agencies and the oldest in the UK. Its famous slogan developed by advertising expert Michael Hennessy: “Don’t just book it….Thomas Cook it” became well-known around the world.

The Bankruptcy and Closure of the Thomas Cook Travel Agency in 2019

Sadly, the travel agency and airline that carried the Thomas Cook named declared bankruptcy in September 2019, leaving about 150,000 British travelers “stranded” all over the world (as well as a number of other nationalities). Perhaps the most devastating effect has been the immediate loss of thousands of jobs for people in the UK and abroad.

The travel agency, however, was properly insured and protected and most of those who booked a trip can apply for a refund, and those left “stranded” on trips were repatriated by the UK. It was the largest repatriation effort since World War 2.

In October 2019, it was announced that all the Thomas Cook travel agency offices in UK will be taken over by Hays Travel and rebranded under their name. Most of the reopened offices are being staffed by former Thomas Cook employees. Hays Travel is now the largest independent travel agency in the UK, and you can read more about them here .

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on all sectors of the global travel industry and Hays Travel was forced to close its travel offices in the UK for a large part of the year. Many of the former UK Thomas Cook offices have now been permanently shuttered and many of the employees who had been rehired were sadly made redundant. You can read more about that here .

Although the future of the Thomas Cook name in travel may be uncertain, I would be very surprised if the name does not continue to be associated in some way with a travel agency.

In fact, although all the UK based companies have stopped trading, some Thomas Cook owned resorted, like Cook’s Club are still operating. Some of its subsidiaries in some other countries are still trading as normal but are also in danger of closure.

What I Learned from Reading about Thomas Cook

Thomas Cook was a quite extraordinary self-made man. He had so many occupations and business ventures and so many setback and failures, even declaring bankruptcy at one point, but he was so persistent and never gave up. He was a passionate man who fought for his Baptist faith, beliefs in equality for all people, and for temperance.

In addition to being impressed by the determination and innovativeness of Thomas Cook himself, I was also quite intrigued in the ways that travel has changed and the ways it has not. We have come a long way since Thomas Cook escorted his first tour as we can travel so much lighter, faster, and more conveniently than would have seemed possible to Victorian age travelers who would accept unheated train cars, month-long ocean crossings, and hotels without hot water.

Cook, a teetotaler until his death, would likely be shocked by the tourism industry’s promotion of sun, sea and sex and the partying and drinking associated with many travel destinations. Indeed, many of these locations are the most popular destinations for British travelers on package holidays.

However, some things have not changed very much. Criticisms of organized travel remain with the notion that independent travel is better and people love to make the subjective “traveler” versus “tourist” distinction.  There are also still locations that remain primarily the playgrounds of the wealthy although never like during the Victorian age. Travel remains class segregated as those who can afford to do so can fly in first class seats, dine in the finest restaurants aboard ships, and sleep in the best cabins with little need to spend much time with other class passengers.

One of the things that I found perhaps the most interesting was the destinations promoted by Thomas Cook still remain, with few exceptions, major tourist destinations today. The country house of Chatsworth House is one of the most notable country houses in England today and people are still flocking to the Scottish highlands, Paris, Rhine River Valley, Swiss Alps, Egypt, the ancient city of Petra, Australia, and most of the other destinations promoted by Thomas Cook in the 1800’s.

While things have changed in some ways beyond recognition, many of the world’s wonders and great destinations continue to awe visitors as they must have awed those first pioneer tourists led by Thomas Cook.

Want to Learn More about Thomas Cook and Victorian Age Travel? 

Resources about Thomas Cook (I used these in writing this article) :

-Hamilton, Jill. (2005). Thomas Cook: The Holiday Maker . The History Press.

-Piers Brendon. (1991). Thomas Cook – 150 Years of Popular Tourism . Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd.

-Withey, Lynne. (1997). Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours – A History of Leisure Travel, 1750 to 1915 .  William Morrow & Co. [This book focuses on a broader view of the history of travel including a lot of attention to Thomas Cook tours and their impact on tourism]

-A great Wikipedia link to some of Thomas Cook’s Traveler Handbooks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cook%27s_Travellers_Handbooks

Another book related to Thomas Cook on my to-read list:

-Swinglehurst, Edmund. (1974).  The Romantic Journey – The Story of Thomas Cook and Victorian Travel . Pica Editions.

So what do you think about Thomas Cook and the Victorian Age of Travel? If you are interested in another article on travel during the Victorian age, check out our post on t wo American women who race around the world in less than 80 days .

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There are 42 comments on this post.

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Baskin Post author

February 28, 2024 at 3:26 am

Wow, so fascinating to read about the history of Thomas Cook, the visionary behind modern tourism. I definitely learned a lot from this about how His legacy continues to shape travel and hospitality industries, very educational post!

Jessica & Laurence Norah Post author

February 28, 2024 at 10:20 am

Thanks for taking the time to comment and glad to hear you enjoyed our article on Thomas Cook. And yes his contributions to the travel industry can definitely still be seend today!

Best, Jessica

Chandra Gurung Post author

May 9, 2023 at 4:15 am

Very interesting post, thanks for the great travel History !!

May 13, 2023 at 8:06 am

Hi Chandra,

Glad you enjoyed our post on Thomas Cook, thanks for taking the time to comment!

Karim Post author

October 29, 2022 at 3:01 pm

Thanks for your blog post on Thomas Cook, very helpful, nice to read.

October 31, 2022 at 10:04 am

Thanks for taking the time to comment, glad you enjoyed our post on Thomas Cook and a bit of the history of the man and his company 😉

Jeanne Gisi Post author

May 24, 2022 at 1:06 pm

While cleaning out some boxes filled with mementos of my travels over the years, I came upon an Itinerary prepared by Thos. Cook & Son for a 6 week European trip in 1965 for my parents & I (I was 13)! It was so fascinating to see the level of detail for each stop, which included England, France, Italy, Spain & Germany; and the beautiful cover & fancy paper used to produce the itinerary. I went looking on the internet to see if they were still in existence & found your blog, which I found so informative about the founder & the many iterations the company had gone through. Probably the most amazing detail in this itinerary was discovering that for hotels in 4 different cities, train rides, rental car & private transport for the entire trip was shown at $328 per person! Astounding! Appreciated reading your historical information about this venerable company.

May 25, 2022 at 5:10 am

So glad you enjoyed our article on the history of Thomas Cook.

Oh, wow, that must be wonderful finding old treasures from your family travels. I love things like that. And yes a 6 week trip for $328 per person (about $3,000 per person in today’s money) would still be a good value today for all that was included for a 6-week trip. And it would have taken longer to put together an itinerary then as the travel agent would have needed to call or mail for inquiries and reservations rather than clicking buttons on a computer.

Yes, Thomas Cook has gone through a lot in recent years. Hays Travel purchased most of the Thomas Cook offices/stores and hired back a lot of the staff in 2019. But then of course the COVID-19 pandemic came soon after, and many of the stores have since re-closed and a number of people had to be let go. For example, our local travel store (in Bath, England) went from a Thomas Cook to a Hays Travel to being empty again in about a year’s time. It will be interesting to see what will happen with traditional travel agencies like this as international travel goes back to 2019 levels and if they will continue to flourish in the face of online competitors.

Ruth Deeks Post author

March 21, 2021 at 8:39 am

Very interesting. My parents who were Baptist missionaries in India had told me that Thomas Cook was a Baptist and gave a special rate to missionaries travelling by boat to and from India, the journey taking 5 weeks approx. I am talking about the 1930s to 1950s. What a shame the The Thomas Cook co. was sold out of the family and went bankrupt.

March 21, 2021 at 9:05 am

Glad you enjoyed our article on Thomas Cook and the history of his travel business. He is an interesting man combining his religion with travel.

Yes, it is sad that the Thomas Cook business went bankrupt. Sadly, the UK travel company which took over most of the Thomas Cook offices in the UK, Hays Travel, has now had to close many of these offices in 2020 due to the coronavirus. This has also sadly left many of the former Thomas Cook employees, many of which were then re-hired by Hays Travel, without a job again. It’s been a very tough couple of years for UK travel agents. Hopefully, 2021 will be a better year for them.

Uwingabire Faustine Post author

November 28, 2020 at 1:03 pm

Hello I was inspired by the theory of Thomas Cook, but wanted to know above all that why was he important in tourism industry?

November 29, 2020 at 7:05 am

Glad you enjoyed our post on Thomas Cook and learning about his life. Hopefully you found your answer about why Thomas Cook was important in the tourism industry from the article. But if not, I’d go back and read the “Why Thomas Cook was a Travel Pioneer” section as that covers a good summary of his achievements related to travel and his importance in the tourism industry.

If you have any further questions, please let me know!

Seba Campos Post author

July 30, 2020 at 6:49 pm

Hi! I am a tourism student from Argentina, I really liked your article and it was extremely revealing for me. I’m working on the Thomas Cook story.

Do you have any information about his family? Why did they decide to sell the company? Why did your son remove him from the company? Thank you so much!

August 1, 2020 at 5:28 am

Glad that you are finding my article helpful in writing your paper on Thomas Cook.

If you are looking for additional information, I’d recommend checking out one of the books about Thomas Cook such as this one by Jill Hamilton published in 2005. The books will give you more details and context than you’ll find online. You should be able to buy it online through Amazon or ebay.

The Thomas Cook company website used to have some good historical information but that information has all been removed since Thomas Cook closed in the UK.

Hope that helps, Jessica

Colin Post author

October 6, 2019 at 5:41 am

Hi Jessica, I was just searching about Thomas Cook after the recent bankruptcy as I was one of the people affected. Luckily for us, we were not on the tour and it was booked several months away, so it seems all will be well in terms of getting our money back. We also have plenty of time to rebook our holiday, so we are luckier than most.

What a great post and what a detailed history of Thomas Cook and his travel company. I have used Thomas Cook to book holidays for years and never knew anything about Thomas Cook, the man or his background. This was a very interesting read!

October 6, 2019 at 6:09 am

Sorry to hear that you were one of the people affected by the Thomas Cook bankruptcy and closure. But I am happy to hear that it sounds like you will receive a full refund for your booked trip and will have plenty of time to rebook your holiday.

So glad you enjoyed our post. Yes, the history of Thomas Cook as a person is very interesting and he was definitely a pioneer in the field of tourism. I am sure the Cook name will continue to be associated with a travel company in one way or another in the future since it is so well recognized worldwide.

Happy travels, Jessica

Eran Post author

December 26, 2018 at 10:21 pm

Hi, Great post! Towards the end of it you mention that a lot of things haven’t changed in travel. However, I think in recent years, with the rise of low-cost flights, now tourism is more reachable to all segments than ever before…

December 27, 2018 at 3:37 am

Hi Eran, Yes, it is amazing how much hasn’t changed and in other ways how much things have changed since the time of Thomas Cook!

I do think that low cost travel has enabled more people to travel, but in more recent times it is probably more due to better economic conditions in countries than things like budget airlines, as we are seeing huge increases in the number of travelers from places like India, China, and Latin America. Travel for leisure is commonplace in many countries, but still remains something for those with money as much of the world’s population can not often afford to travel internationally for leisure. According to Hans Rosling, it is estimated that only the richest 1 billion people in the world live where they can easily afford airplane tickets, and 2 billion people spend less than $2 a day.

Interesting to look at travel from a global perspective as it can be easy for Western people to take it for granted.

Alok kumar mandal Post author

August 17, 2018 at 8:15 am

very interesting and useful facts about Mr. Cook…

August 17, 2018 at 11:32 am

Hi Alok, Yes, Thomas Cook was an interesting man and we the see the effects of his legacy on modern travel all over the place, especially since we are now living in the UK. Best, Jessica

Bryant Kerr Post author

November 4, 2017 at 10:08 pm

I have a old traveling trunk that have the names Colonel Thomas Cook and Sons the other name is Lieutenant Colonel Rodger Young military number 03443 79 New Delhi does anyone know anything about this trunk

November 7, 2017 at 8:29 am

Hi Bryant, I don’t know anything about the trunk, but there is a fairly well-known American from Ohio that was in the military named Rodger Wilton Young although not sure if he was ever in New Delhi. There was also a Thomas Cook who served at the Addiscombe Military Seminary in 1837. But the Thomas Cook & Sons are probably just the ones that arranged the travel so you’ll probably have better luck tracking down Young. Best of luck!! ~ Jessica

Taranath Bohara Post author

January 31, 2017 at 5:09 am

I love this guy Thomas Cook, who helped bring affordable tourism to the world. Many people are involved and have followed his principles. He was a great who taught the lesson of tour and travel. Great blog post!

January 31, 2017 at 6:20 am

Hi Taranath, Thanks for taking the time to comment. Yes, I really love the story of Thomas Cook and I don’t think a lot of people know the influence he had on the modern tourism industry but at least his name is still carried on in the company he founded. Glad you enjoyed our article! Best, Jessica

LOUIS GEEN Post author

January 31, 2017 at 9:11 am

Could this be the same man? I am a Freemason and a member of the Port Natal Masonic Lodge in Durban, South Africa. The Lodge is almost 160 years old, having been consecrated on 12th August 1858. According to our records Thomas Cook was Master of the Lodge during the Masonic year 1883 – 1884. The Lodge is in possession of a beautiful oil painting of Thomas Cook that was donated by him to the Lodge. Until I discovered Thomas Cook’s name in the Port Natal Lodge’s records, I was not aware that the Father of Modern Tourism resided in South Africa. Could our Thomas Cook be the same man that turned tourism into the industry it has become?

January 31, 2017 at 10:22 am

Hi Louis, How interesting and thanks for commenting again on this post! It is possible of course as Thomas Cook lived from 1808-1892, but I don’t think that Thomas Cook was a freemason and I don’t remember reading about him spending time in South Africa. Thomas Cook is a fairly common name. However, I am no expert, and to find out for sure, I’d contact the Thomas Cook Group and they should be able to easily verify if the painting is of the same Thomas Cook of the travel agency. Let me know if you have any difficulty contacting them and I’d love to hear what you find out even if it turns out to be another Thomas Cook! Best Jessica

Tim Post author

June 7, 2016 at 7:22 am

Thanks for all this information on Thomas Cook! I am looking to for copy of one of the recommended books on Amazon!

travelcats Post author

June 13, 2016 at 7:30 am

Hi Tim, You are very welcome for the information on Thomas Cook. Amazing story and an important person in modern travel history and the current state of tourism. Good luck finding the book! ~ Jessica

Kerstin Post author

May 24, 2016 at 6:43 am

Meanwhile, Diccon Bewes has written a book on Cook’s Grand Tour of Switzerland, which I highly recommend to anybody interested in Victorian era travel: Slow Train to Switzerland , ISBN 9781857886092.

May 24, 2016 at 7:27 am

Hi Kerstin, Thanks for that book recommendation. I have not read it but it does have good reviews and I think it would be great for those readers interested in Thomas Cook tours to Switzerland or early mass tourism to the Alps! Best, Jessica

Louis Geen Post author

November 12, 2014 at 1:26 am

Thomas Cook was certainly an interesting character. Another interesting fact about this amazing man is that he was a Freemason and that he was Master of the Port Natal Lodge in Durban, South Africa, from 1883/1884. The Lodge now 156 years old, still exists and has in its possession a beautiful oil painting of Thomas Cook in its original gilded frame, which he donated to the Lodge.

November 15, 2014 at 9:28 am

Hi Louis, I did not know this. I don’t recall any reference to the freemasons or even South Africa during my readings and research on Thomas Cook. Do you have a reference for this for those interested in reading more about this? I couldn’t find any info about the lodge online.

Nic Post author

November 7, 2013 at 9:03 am

The quotes from Thomas Cook are great.

November 7, 2013 at 10:14 am

Agreed:) I really like the one in the green box.

Meghan Post author

November 6, 2013 at 6:24 pm

This is so interesting! I’m always so fascinated by stories about travel in the past. I recently learned that it wasn’t until the last few centuries that people began traveling for pleasure. I’ve even read that in some parts of the world, people think it is a little strange for a person to travel just because, and not for some business or personal errand. But all this information I never knew. I’ve never even heard of Thomas Cook until now. Thanks for sharing!

November 7, 2013 at 10:12 am

I know, it is so interesting to read about travels in prior centuries. That’s interesting about how some people see travel as strange today but I imagine in places where people have very little money, leisure travel is not much of a possibility.

bevchen Post author

November 5, 2013 at 11:51 pm

I knew only some of this. It’s very interesting!

November 6, 2013 at 7:20 am

Yes, it is a fascinating history.

Meredith Post author

November 5, 2013 at 9:52 pm

Wow, I had no idea! I’d heard the name but didn’t fully realize the history behind it. I feel like I owe him a big thank you! Even now there are some places in the world that would’ve been difficult for me to see without a tour group. Fascinating!

November 6, 2013 at 7:19 am

Yes, there are definitely several places in the world that make more sense with organized travel or travel guides than on your own. Thomas Cook’s company actually also helped people book unecorted independent travel and just made all the travel arrangements, allowing people to do it on their own. BTW, did you see how he was also captivated by Scotland (made me think of you).

Kate Post author

November 5, 2013 at 5:19 pm

Not only am I amazed I didn’t know any of this, but I am fascinated as to how much history there really is behind Thomas Cook!

November 5, 2013 at 7:21 pm

Yes, it really is an interesting history. The British, like Thomas Cook, were really the pioneers that started the modern tourism industry. It didn’t hurt that the British Empire stretched across the world:)

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Thomas Cook: Why did the world's oldest travel firm go bust?

After 178 years in business, Thomas Cook, the world's oldest travel company, has gone bust. It's just the latest in a long line of European carriers to have close up shop over the past two years.

After 178 years in business, Britain's Thomas Cook, the world's oldest travel company, has gone bust.

Thomas Cook's collapse on Monday sparked the UK's largest repatriation in peacetime history. About 600,000 people were left stranded abroad — 150,000 of whom are UK residents.

The announcement from CEO Peter Fankhauser came after the board failed to secure a deal with creditors and the government to bail it out of its £1.6 billion (€1.8 billion) debt pile.

Where did it all go wrong?

For Simon Calder, travel editor at the Independent newspaper, the company's troubles stem from the fact that it "didn't keep up with transformations".

"Thomas Cook revolutionised travel, they did amazing things, they democratised it, they industrialised travel, they really invented the package holiday," he told Euronews.

"But then in the late stages of the 20th century, and particularly in the 21rst century, they took their eye off the ball. They didn't quite sort of realise that people — largely a lot of younger people — aren't using high street travel agents.

"They were slow with the internet and they simply didn't take much notice of the big low-cost airlines such as EasyJet and Ryanair," he added.

READ MORE: Repatriation begins after the collapse of travel firm Thomas Cook

According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), Brits were much more likely to go on holidays abroad in 2016 than they did in 1996 but the trends had been completely upended.

"In the last 20 years, UK tourists have turned their backs on traditional two-week holidays in favour of short breaks and week-long trips," the ONS wrote in a report .

It noted that back in the 1990s, "hardly anyone had access to the internet, so you probably booked your trip by going to a travel agent or finding a cheap package deal on Teletext".

The Internet and the emergence of no-frill airlines saw passenger numbers at UK airports increased by 85% over the past two decades, from 135 million to 251 million and travellers needed no longer buying packages but could independently plan affordable holidays.

According to the Centre for Aviation ( CAPA ), a research company specialised in the aviation and travel industry, the Thomas Cook Group carried 20 million airline passengers in the year ending September 2018.

This made it the 14th biggest European airlines in terms of passenger numbers. The Lufthansa Group and Ryanair occupied the first two spots, each carrying 142 million and 139 million passengers.

Still, according to Paul Davies, head of UK Travel research at Mintel, "Thomas Cook's decline should not be confused with the demise of the package holiday."

"In fact, the package holiday market is still performing well. Unfortunately for Thomas Cook, it lost out to its rivals within this sector, most notably TUI and Jet2, with Mintel's research showing that these brands consistently deliver a better customer experience," he told Euronews.

READ MORE: Thomas Cook employees take to social media following liquidation

The low-cost airlines and their cut-throat prices have certainly been a boon to customers but legacy airlines, which have been forced to decrease their own prices, still can't align themselves.

The Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), an independent Brussels-based think tank, found last year that that low-cost airlines are on average 40% cheaper than legacy carriers on international flights and 20% on domestic flights.

"I actually bought, would you believe, just before midnight, a Thomas Cook holiday," Calder told Euronews on Monday.

"A week in Greece next month and no I won't be going. But it only cost me €210 for flights, accommodations, transfers, everything else. Nobody is making money at that sort of price," he added.

Thomas Cook is certainly just the latest in a long line of European carriers to have to close up shop over the past two years.

Earlier this year, Britain's Flybmi, Germany's Germania and Iceland's Wow Air went bust. The year prior, it was Monarch Airlines and Air Berlin amongst others. France's Aigle Azur and XL Airways are both seeking rescue deals at the moment.

But for Mintel's Davies, "whilst Thomas Cook's collapse is sad news for its employees and holidaymakers, its established competitors are now suddenly presented with further opportunities for growth"

"EasyJet Holidays will no doubt be factoring this into its strategy ahead of its relaunch later this year," he added.

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We’re All Going On A Summer Holiday: The Rise of Thomas Cook

This week’s news of Thomas Cook ’s bankruptcy marks the end of a British business that had its origins in a radical, inclusive vision of travel for all. Founded in Leicester in the early 1840s, the firm was perhaps the nineteenth century’s greatest force for popularizing and democratizing travel. Although the firm and its clients were often criticized by conservative commentators as a vulgarizing and destructive influence, Cook’s promotion of ‘excursion’ travel allowed a huge number of ordinary British men and women to experience travel in a way that would have been unimaginable for their parents and grandparents. In doing so, Cook transformed the fields of tourism and leisure.

Founded in the early 1840s by temperance campaigner, printer, and Baptist preacher Thomas Cook, the firm quickly expanded from its origins providing day excursions to temperance meetings to become a national and then global travel agency. Propelled by Cook’s formidable organizational and entrepreneurial skills – and later by his son John Mason Cook’s even more impressive business acumen – the firm built on its early temperance excursions, offering tours of Scotland and Wales, cheap transport to London for the Great Exhibition of 1851, and then foreign excursions from the mid-1850s. Cook negotiated relatively cheap fares for his mass outings, making excursion travel affordable for a wider spectrum of society.

However, Cook was also the beneficiary of a range of developments in mid-Victorian society. Travel historian James Buzard points out that his enterprise was ‘fuelled by steam power’. The rapid expansion of the railway network allowed him to organise rapid, efficient group travel in a way that would have been impossible in earlier decades. As Cook himself said, ‘Railway travelling is travelling for the million; the humble may travel, the rich may travel’. Meanwhile the growth in real incomes and an increase in leisure time (including paid bank holidays from the early 1870s onwards) allowed many more ordinary people to contemplate taking holidays in the first place. The days when travel for pleasure was the prerogative of young aristocrats on the Grand Tour were already well and truly over by the time Smith started to offer his excursions.

Cook’s biographer Piers Brendon notes that ‘Cook did not invent tourism or the conducted tour’. He did, however, have the prescience to identify a vast potential market, and the determination to overcome considerable obstacles. At the time of his first excursion to Scotland, for example, the railway networks of Scotland and England were not yet linked, necessitating a train journey from Cook’s Leicester base to Fleetwood, then a steamer voyage to Ardrossan on the Ayrshire coast, before rejoining the Scottish rail system. Cook’s first Scottish trips were not a great success – in fact he briefly went bankrupt in 1846, before rapidly bouncing back to take advantage of the new rail link between Newcastle and Edinburgh, as well as offering tours of the Lake District and north Wales. By the 1860s he was regularly transporting thousands of tourists north of the border, and he later acknowledged that Scottish tourism had been a key factor in transforming his fortunes. Foreign excursions to Europe, Egypt, India and beyond soon followed (not to mention a brief foray into military adventurism, when in 1884 John Mason Cook agreed to transport the British expeditionary forces attempting to relieve the beseiged General Gordon at Khartoum) and by the latter decades of the century the name Thomas Cook had become synonymous with mass tourism.

Cook’s innovations included not just what would become known as the package holiday, but also the whole concept of ‘through ticketing’ – buying a single ticket which would be honoured across a whole series of railways and at numerous transport hubs – and the concept of the travellers’ cheque, in the form of Cooks Circular Notes, coupons that could be exchanged at participating hotels, banks and ticket agents. He was also relatively progressive in his attitude to women travellers, who often faced prejudice and suspicion. A first-hand account in the Thomas Cook archives by the Lincolne sisters, four middle-class women from Suffolk who joined Cook’s first foreign trip to the Rhine in 1855, recalls the objections they faced from male acquaintances, ‘the gentlemen thinking we were far too independent, and bringing up various objections’. Having Cook as guide not only silenced these objectors but also smoothed the passage through unfamiliar territory for the women: ‘We found the greatest comfort in having such a friend as Mr Cook to whom to look in every difficulty, to take from us the perplexity of selecting hotels, arranging with landlords, procuring railway tickets, exchanging money, or learning the times of trains, &c’.

It was this very ease, and the ability it gave for a new kind of traveller to experience foreign countries, that caused disquiet among some observers. If Cook was emblematic of popular tourism, for some critics his clients also represented a model of passive, mindless consumption that they regarded as at odds with their own ethos of high-minded self-improvement. Ironically, given Cook’s own Nonconformist, temperance and strictly respectable approach, and the rather genteel nature of many of his clients, the word ‘Cookite’ soon became a term of disapprobation, used to denote a thoughtless, boorish type of Briton abroad. It was often used indiscriminately to label any lower middle-class traveller, whether or not they were actually using Cook’s services.

The novelist Charles Lever’s 1865 attack on Cook for sending out ‘low-bred, vulgar, and ridiculous’ members of the lower classes to Italy (where Lever was then living and working as British consul), would set the pattern for many elite criticisms of mass tourism in the years that followed. Much of this criticism was, like Lever’s, a matter of straightforward snobbery. Minnie Thackeray, visiting Zermatt on her honeymoon with Leslie Stephen in 1867, wrote that her hotel was ‘swarming with the most alarming kind of vermin’, and that the town she had formerly regarded as a kind of ‘little heaven’ was now being ‘inundated with beings of the contemptible shopkeeper order’. This kind of social distaste was often directed at Cook’s clients, despite their generally respectable behaviour and social standing. Other criticisms were couched in the language of conservation and the preservation of wild, unspoiled natural places, but underneath they were often motivated by the same distrust of the masses. As John Ruskin put it when an extension of the railway network to the northern outpost of Keswick in the Lake District was proposed: ‘I don’t want them to see Helvellyn when they’re drunk’.

In reality, as some of the documents in the Thomas Cook archives make clear, Cook’s tourists were far more likely to be lively, engaged and curious than drunk. The archives – currently housed at the bankrupt firm’s headquarters in Peterborough but now facing an uncertain future – contain a rich selection of material from Cook’s history. It is true that some accounts tend to confirm the reputation of British tourists abroad. The Lincolne sisters, for instance, recall one member of their party whose ‘voice was heard like that of Stentor’: ‘We ladies used to be amused at our friend’s conduct to the bewildered waiters, as they flew to obey his command, he only speaking his native English, which when not understood, he thundered out afresh, calling them stupid for only speaking French and German’. Thomas William Tidmarsh of Upper Hornsey Rise, London, who travelled to Europe using Cook’s ticketing system in 1882, recalled trying to ask for directions to the post office from a local boy in Antwerp: ‘The lad, who was very stupid, took us to the post office (after some difficulty in explaining what we wanted). We had to get out a post card and threaten to put it down his throat, pretending that his mouth was the receptacle for letters and we were about to post one’, he claimed. But the overall tone of the narratives here and in other accounts by early ‘Cookites’ is of curiosity, delight, and sometimes even awe. In many cases, these tourists would have been the first people of their class able to travel abroad, or in some cases even to afford a holiday in their own country. Nor was all the traffic in one direction – as well as many narratives by clients, they include an account by one of Cook’s couriers, Frank Buckley, of an 1870 visit to Britain by the Maharaja of Kolapor, who arrived with seven ‘native’ servants ‘and 22 packages of bags, boxes, hampers, including his own spices and cooking utensils’, and was transported around Scotland using Cook’s services.

Efforts are now underway to secure a new home for the Cook archive, possibly in the county records office at Leicester, where the Thomas Cook story began. It is to be hoped that this collection can be kept together for future historians of travel and tourism.

Further reading

Piers Brendon, Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism (Secker & Warburg, 1991)

James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800-1918 (Clarendon Press, 1993)

Jill Hamond, Thomas Cook: The Holiday-Maker (Sutton Publishing, 2005)

One Comment

A very interesting and educational insight into the history of this famous organisation. Such a shame that it has failed after so many years, but let’s hope that the archive as part of its legacy can be saved.

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What Killed Thomas Cook, One of the Oldest Names in Travel?

By David Segal

• Published Sept. 24, 2019 Updated Sept. 26, 2019

The demise of Thomas Cook, Britain’s most venerated travel agency, is shaping up as one of the country’s greatest corporate fiascos.

When the agency went out of business on Monday , it left some 150,000 vacationers from the United Kingdom stranded on foreign soil. It put about 21,000 jobs at risk. It prompted calls for an investigation of its management and clawback of executive pay.

So what would Thomas Cook, the man, think of what has became of Thomas Cook, the company?

“He would be shocked and appalled,” said Piers Brendon, author of “Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism.” “Greed and incompetence have wrecked a fine company which has a name that resonated for nearly 200 years.”

Not surprisingly, the company has different theories for its collapse. In May, it reported a gargantuan loss of 1.5 billion pounds, about $1.9 billion, for the first half of the year. The heat wave of 2018 had “reduced customer demand for winter sun.” More important, its chief executive, Peter Fankhauser, cited uncertainties surrounding Brexit.

“There is now little doubt that the Brexit process,” Mr. Fankhauser wrote in the report, “has led many U.K. customers to delay their holiday plans for this summer.”

Some observers are, in fact, calling Thomas Cook the first major Brexit casualty. The contemporaneous decline in the pound, widely considered a Brexit side effect, has also made holidays more financially daunting.

But others maintain that the company’s fate was sealed long before the referendum was even put up for a vote. For years, Thomas Cook played a somewhat frantic and fantastically expensive game of catch-up as it tried to pivot into the digital age. In the end, Thomas Cook was groaning under $2.1 billion of debt, according to the company, most of it accumulated in pricey, ill-timed investments made years ago.

The most problematic was a 2007 merger with MyTravel, a major British competitor. The idea was to create a juggernaut, but combining the two companies proved a hugely expensive misstep. By 2010, debt at the newly christened Thomas Cook Group had more than doubled, to the equivalent of $1 billion. As recently as this year, the deal’s aftershocks were still being felt. Most of that £1.5 billion loss announced in May was attributed by the company to the MyTravel merger.

In 2010, Thomas Cook pulled off another deal, this time with the Co-operative Travel, which operated 400 stores located in areas of prime shopping real estate, or what is known in Britain as high streets. Added to Thomas Cook’s 800 shops, the company became the king of brick-and-mortar travel retail just as much of the clientele was headed online.

“The company had a large number of high street locations, and that’s historically where people would book holidays,” said Julie Palmer, a regional managing partner at Begbies Traynor, a corporate restructuring firm. “They’d go in, have a chat, look over some brochures for a couple hours to get some advice. Then they’d come back the next day and book their trip through a travel agent. I can’t remember the last time I booked a holiday like that.”

A cash crunch was underway by 2011, when Thomas Cook asked lenders for an injection worth about $125 million. And in 2012, the folly of the company’s high street strategy was laid bare when the company announced a turnaround plan that included the closing of 200 shops .

All of this would not merely exceed the imagination of Mr. Cook, a one-time cabinet maker and lay Baptist preacher, born in 1808. It would have been contrary to his nature, said his biographer, Mr. Brendon. The origins of his company could hardly have been more humble. It started with a kind of anti-booze cruise.

Mr. Cook considered alcohol a singularly malign force in the Victorian era, and at the age of 32, he organized a group of 500 like-minded citizens to go by train to a temperance meeting 12 miles away.

For the next three summers, Mr. Cook’s efforts were break-even civic acts inspired by a zeal for social reform, not profits. He considered travel the best alternative to the demon drink. By 1845, he started making money, first with a trip to Liverpool, then Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and later beyond the United Kingdom — to the United States, Europe and the Middle East.

With railroads transforming travel, his timing was impeccable. The company was soon targeting the wealthiest demographics.

“The company quickly moved upmarket, into the aristocracy, and became known as the travel agents to the British Empire,” Mr. Brendon said. “It was almost like part of the civil service. It was the company that transported all of the most important people to Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.”

In 1928, the Cook family sold out to a Belgian company, Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits. When Germany occupied Belgium in World War II, the British government nationalized Thomas Cook. Government management was criticized as slow-footed, but the 1950s and ‘60s were boom years for overseas travel.

“There was a huge desire to get away from the gray, from the austerity and rationing of postwar Britain,” said Roger Bray, a writer for Silver Travel Advisor, billed as a website for mature travelers. “People had more money, and they wanted to spend it.”

Thomas Cook went private again in 1972. The business changed radically with the advent of the internet, making a la carte vacations easier to book at home. But packaged holidays — those all-in deals on flights and hotels, which have been the core of Thomas Cook’s business in recent decades — are still popular. The number of United Kingdom travelers who took this kind of holiday stood at 18 million in 2018, up four million from eight years earlier, according to ABTA, an association of travel agents and tour operators.

“If you go back 25, 30 years ago, it’s true that about 90 percent of holidays were packaged tours,” said Sean Tipton, a spokesman for the association. “It’s less than half now, but record numbers of people are taking vacations. So it’s still a strong business.”

The British government is spending £100 million, roughly $125 million, to fly stranded Thomas Cook customers home in what is being called the largest peacetime repatriation in the country’s history. The price tag could go up, but Grant Shapps, the secretary of state for transport, said it was far cheaper than a full bailout of the company.

For those who sank money into Thomas Cook, all that’s left is investor’s remorse.

Neset Kockar, a Turkish businessman, recently took an 8 percent stake in the company, seeking a role in its rescue. After its collapse, he told the website turizmguncel.com , “I didn’t know it was this badly run. You can’t make so many mistakes, one after another.”

An earlier version of this article mischaracterized the Thomas Cook customers who were stranded when the company went out of business. About 150,000 vacationers from the United Kingdom were stranded on foreign soil, not 150,000 total.

How we handle corrections

This American Said He Had to Pay $2,400 to Get Home After Travel Company Thomas Cook Collapsed

T he collapse of one of the world’s oldest travel agencies has impacted an estimated 600,000 travelers all over the world on Monday—including some Americans.

Thomas Cook collapsed into liquidation in the early hours of Monday morning after rescue talks failed to secure $250 million in contingency funding, leaving many thousands who paid for vacations with the company without a return ticket home.

“We are sorry to inform you that all holidays and flights provided by these companies have been canceled and are no longer operating,” the Thomas Cook said, adding that all Thomas Cook retail shops have also closed.

Thomas Cook is a British company, but it attracted customers from all over the world, particularly Europe.

British stranded travelers are now directed to turn to the U.K.’s Civil Aviation Authority—which is working to fly back passengers who booked their flights with the travel agency and were due back to the U.K. between Sept. 23 and Oct. 6.

On Monday, Condor Airlines , a German airline subsidiary to Thomas Cook, said that it currently had 240,000 customers abroad awaiting flights to return home.

The travel agency also advised passengers who were due to fly out of the U.K. with Thomas Cook Airlines that their flights were canceled.

While few Americans are likely to be impacted, at least one Florida resident said he spent more than $2,000 to get home after booking a trip to Scotland with the company.

BBC Scotland spoke to American Joe Datolli, who was stuck at Glasgow Airport with his mother Sally waiting for a flight back to Orlando.

“It’s been frustrating… While we were asleep, ready to head back in the morning, they went out of business and there’s nobody to be seen,” he said.

Datolli told the BBC that he and his mother were able to book a flight to Orlando from Dublin but it ended up costing them nearly $2,400 dollars more.

Joe Datolli has had to pay $1600 to get a flight home from Glasgow to Florida today after the #ThomasCook collapse: pic.twitter.com/udPTqqHfxL — Clyde 1 News (@Clyde1News) September 23, 2019

“As we’re standing here trying to book another flight the prices keep climbing or the seats keep getting taken. It’s becoming more and more difficult,” he said.

The collapse of the agency has also affected thousands of employees.

In a statement, Thomas Cook Chief Executive Peter Fankhauser, apologized to customers and employees.

“I would like to apologize to our millions of customers, and thousands of employees, suppliers and partners who have supported us for many years. Despite huge uncertainty over recent weeks, our teams continued to put customers first, showing why Thomas Cook is one of the best-loved brands in travel,” he said. “This marks a deeply sad day for the company which pioneered package holidays and made travel possible for millions of people around the world.”

Here is what to know about Thomas Cook:

Why did Thomas Cook collapse?

Faced with Brexit, poor mergers and increased competition, the 178-year-old company finally fell to its demise on Monday.

Key to its downfall is Thomas Cook’s merger with MyTravel, a U.K.-based package travel company, in 2007. What had initially started out with hope, ended up in disaster. Thomas Cook ended up with huge debts that proved impossible to manage as, MyTravel had only made a profit once since 2001. The impact of the merger came to a head in May after Thomas Cook reported a record loss of £1.5 billion ($1.85 billion) and a steep drop in summer sales.

Thomas Cook also faced new competition from lower cost rival Jet2Holidays, putting the company’s profits under fresh pressure . Previously, the market had been split between Thomas Cook and Tui. Within two months, Thomas Cook had to issue two profit warnings .

Brexit didn’t help their situation either—the original March 29, 2019 Brexit deadline meant that people were nervous about booking holidays .

In August this year, there was hope that Thomas Cook could break free from disaster after it agreed to a $1.1 billion rescue deal with Fosun, a China-based investment company, Thomas Cook’s biggest shareholder and its debtholders.

However, as of Monday, Thomas Cook collapsed into liquidation after talks with shareholders, lenders and the U.K. government failed to come up with a rescue plan after the company’s banks demanded a further $250 million.

The agency was a popular one-stop-shop for travelers—known for its all-inclusive travel packages: the agency would book flights, hotels and tours for travelers.

Marc-David L. Seidel, professor at the University of British Columbia Sauder School of Business says travel agencies like Thomas Cook have become less relevant and necessary for travelers during the internet age.

“The rise of online travel information shifted power in the industry so that individual consumers no longer had to rely on brick and mortar travel agencies for expertise as much,” he tells TIME. “This intensified as the internet transitioned to more of an online travel community model where individual travelers share information about everything travel related to each other. That readily available and detailed information further reduced the power of travel agencies which had traditionally been the primary source of such expertise.”

Seidel adds that the rise of Airbnb might have also played a part.

“The growth trend of small travel providers such as individuals offering up rental units through internet platforms also puts pressure on organizations like Thomas Cook as a portion of their revenue was based on lodging,” he says.

Are American travelers affected?

While the bulk of Thomas Cook customers were based in Europe, the agency offered services to major U.S cities including New York City, Orlando and San Fransisco.

The State Department says that it is not able to track how many U.S. citizens are currently affected because American are not required to register their travel to a foreign country.

A State Department spokesperson tells TIME that the agency is currently monitoring the situation and that travelers should make their own arrangements to return to the United States.

“If Americans are destitute and without resources to get back to the United States, they should contact the U.S. Embassy or Consulate in the country where they are traveling to help them get in touch with family members or to evaluate other options,” a state department spokesperson said.

Frederic Dimanche, the director at the Ted Rogers School of Hospitality and Tourism Management at Ryerson University tells TIME that the effect on American passengers will be “not much” and that agency had a limited presence in the U.S.—with most of the company’s business coming from the U.K., Germany and Scandinavian countries.

“Thomas Cook had offices in the U.S., but beyond that most operations are European… this will likely be inconsequential for (travelers),” he says.

Seidel also says that the agency going out of business will most likely not have too much of an effect on American travelers.

“They have limited service in some cities—basically, it’s major cities and the leisure market, and a lot of that service would be outbound rather than inbound, so people visiting the States from Europe and a lot of their stuff was offered as packages,” he says.

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Write to Gina Martinez at [email protected]

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Thomas Cook Travel Inc.

Prior to its acquisition by the American Express Company in 1994, Thomas Cook Travel Inc. was the third-largest travel agency in the United States. At the time of the takeover, Thomas Cook operated 500 offices across the country and sold one out of every 50 airline tickets in the United States. Staffed by more than 3,000 employees, the company had an impressive roster of business clients including Ford Motor Co., AT & T, and John Hancock Financial Services. Independently owned by Linda and David Paresky, Thomas Cook Travel licensed its name from the oldest travel agency in the world, The Thomas Cook Group Ltd., based in the United Kingdom.

Thomas Cook Is Founded in 1841

The Thomas Cook Group Ltd. was the eponymous creation of an industrious English entrepreneur. From a humble beginning chartering a train to a temperance rally in 1841, Cook expanded his business into one of the world's first full-service travel firms. After the resounding success of his first venture, Cook quickly expanded his operations, providing rail trips and making hotel reservations for customers for journeys all over the British Isles. Cook's excursions proved so popular that he began offering trips to Europe, North America, and--beginning in 1871 around the world. Buoyed by these successes, Cook's company was able to open 120 travel offices in the United Kingdom and abroad by 1885, and Cook himself branched out to write guidebooks. The company also remained on the cutting edge of developments in the travel industry. Thomas Cook Ltd. began offering cruise trips as early as the mid-1870s, pioneered an early form of travelers' check, and was booking air travel by 1911, a mere eight years after the Wright Brothers made history at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

The company also had a long history in the American market. Just months after the Civil War ended in 1865, Cook's ran its first U.S. tour, which included stops at various battlefields. Six years later, Cook formed a partnership with an American businessman that they called Cook, Son & Jenkins. This relationship subsequently dissolved acrimoniously, but by then it had helped Cook's entrench itself in the American market. To bolster its business further, the company took a pavilion at the Centennial Celebration in Philadelphia in 1876, and later expanded its offerings to include not just traditional sightseeing trips but even travel packages for immigrants coming to the United States and Canada. By 1896, Cook's American business made travel arrangements to the Klondike for gold prospectors.

Control of the company remained with the Cook family until the late 1920s. Thomas Cook himself had died in 1892, and his son and business partner did the same eight years later. His three grandsons then ran the company until the last of them retired in 1928, at which point it was sold to a Belgian travel concern, Compagnie des Wagons-Lits et des Grands Express Europeens. When Germany occupied Belgium in World War II, the company was taken over by the German Custodian of Enemy Properties, but the British government arranged for it to be re-acquired by several railway companies at the close of the war. When the railroads were nationalized in 1948, ownership of Thomas Cook Ltd. passed to the crown as well.

Although Thomas Cook had become an institution both in the United Kingdom and the United States, the company risked losing touch with younger consumers in the 1960s. As a state-run business, Thomas Cook was unable to invest the same level of funding into its operations that its private rivals could. While other travel agencies crafted new strategies to attract more customers and increase revenue, such as purchasing airlines, Thomas Cook saw its sales flatten. As a result, the British government tentatively explored selling the travel agency.

U.S. Corporate Laws Prevent New Owner of Thomas Cook from Owning U.S. Offices

Midland Bank acquired Thomas Cook in 1974. Since U.S. banking laws prohibited any national bank--such as Midland--from owning domestic travel agencies, Midland sold Thomas Cook's U.S. operations to Dun & Bradstreet in 1975. Midland did not relinquish control of the Thomas Cook name, but Dun & Bradstreet was allowed to continue to operate the U.S. travel agencies under the Cook name through a licensing agreement. Although The Thomas Cook Group Ltd. had no equity in the American operations, it did link the agencies into its travel network. More importantly, the British branch could supply the independent American offices with travelers' checks, which represented an increasing portion of The Thomas Cook Group Ltd.'s revenues. Only American Express outperformed Cook in this segment of the travel industry.

Crimson Travel Is Founded and Flourishes

At about the same time that Dun & Bradstreet made this pivotal purchase, Crimson Travel Service--the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based travel agency that would later carry the Thomas Cook American franchise--began to expand. Founded in 1965 by the husband-and-wife duo David and Linda Paresky, Crimson quickly grew through creative marketing efforts. Graced with the same gift for travel innovation as Thomas Cook, Paresky launched a number of bold initiatives. As a competitor explained in the September 18, 1994, Boston Globe, 'Paresky saw before most of us that the masses wanted to go, and he knew where they wanted to go.' Crimson chartered several immensely popular 'Cruises to Nowhere,' that brought the luxury of a cruise vacation to middle-class consumers. In 1968 the company forged a strategic alliance with a Western-themed television show called 'Boomtown,' whereby Crimson chartered mass trips for kids (guided by Trailer, the show's host) and received ample exposure in the process. The 'Boomtown' trips were a huge success and continued through the 1990s. By 1969 Crimson had opened its third Boston-area branch office, and its leisure travel business soared. By 1987 the company reported billings of $150 million.

As Crimson saw its fortune rise, the travel industry as a whole experienced tectonic changes in the 1980s. The frenetic globalization of American business meant that corporate employees traveled more frequently and purchased a growing percentage of airline tickets. Since Crimson's revenues came mostly from vacationers, not business people, the company would risk its future profitability if it did not develop the corporate side of its operations. In 1988 Crimson purchased Heritage Travel, a rival Cambridge agency. Not only was Heritage equipped with cutting-edge computer technology, but it also ran a formidable corporate business.

Thomas Cook Changes Ownership in 1988

In 1988 Dun & Bradstreet put Thomas Cook up for sale in order to concentrate on its core marketing, credit risk, finance, and directory information divisions. Publishing magnate Robert Maxwell purchased Thomas Cook in 1989, and immediately renewed the licensing agreement with Midland to use the storied Cook name. At the time of Maxwell's acquisition, Thomas Cook was a sizable operation, generating sales of $365 million and operating 60 full-service locations and nine regional reservation centers. Many industry analysts speculated that Maxwell would quickly sell the company, since publishing was his primary concern. However, Maxwell pledged to expand Thomas Cook through a series of acquisitions that would make the franchise the leading American travel service firm.

But despite his protestations to the contrary, Maxwell sold a 50 percent stake in Thomas Cook to the Pareskys' Crimson/Heritage business in 1988. With Maxwell, the Pareskys presided over the third-largest agency in the country, with revenues topping $1.3 billion. David Paresky served as president, chairman, and chief executive of his new empire, and he moved Thomas Cook's corporate headquarters from New York City to Cambridge. The co-owners quickly turned to bolstering Thomas Cook's roster of corporate clients.

While the ownership of Thomas Cook changed hands in the United States, the keeper of the coveted license--The Thomas Cook Group Ltd.--went through its own shifts. In 1992 Midland sold its subsidiary to LTU Group, one of Germany's largest tour operators, and Westdeutsche Landesbanke, a German bank. Westdeutsche Landesbanke purchased 90 percent of The Thomas Cook Group Ltd.'s shares, while LTU Group controlled the remaining ten. The Orange Country Register was quick to point out to its readers that the sale in no way affected Thomas Cook Travel Inc. 'The company licenses the name and expects to continue doing so under the new ownership,' noted the paper.

The Pareskys Gain 100 Percent Control of Thomas Cook Travel

Although Thomas Cook Travel Inc. had no problems with the license, the company did endure some turbulent times in 1991 when Maxwell died suddenly. One of his privately held companies, Headington Holdings Limited, went into bankruptcy. Headington owned Maxwell Travel Inc., which in turn owned Maxwell's 50 percent share of Thomas Cook. A number of potential buyers hungrily eyed the stake in Thomas Cook, including Midland Bank, which had by then divested the bank that had prevented it from owning the chain in 1979. Paresky had right of first refusal, though, and in 1993 he and his wife purchased the Maxwell stake.

Even with complete control of Thomas Cook Travel, Paresky planned no major changes. 'We're continuing with the same strategy we've had before, differentiating our service through innovation and quality,' he told The Boston Globe on January 12, 1993. 'I don't think our operating philosophy will change.' 1993 sales soared to over $1.7 billion, and the company ran approximately 500 offices throughout the United States.

Paresky's efforts to bolster Thomas Cook's corporate accounts had succeeded. At the close of 1993, 84 percent of the company's sales were from businesses. Thomas Cook's list of clients was impressive. Ford Motor Co., Fidelity Investment, Hewlett-Packard, and John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Co. all made their travel arrangements through Thomas Cook. In 1994 the company won three more substantial accounts--the British Embassy, Walsh America, and Pharmaceutical Marketing Services Inc.

Sale to American Express

Despite their success, the Pareskys approached arch-rival American Express about selling Thomas Cook. 'American Express will bring more size and more strength and more ability to invest in our people,' Paresky explained to Travel Weekly on September 15, 1994. To the Boston Globe , Paresky admitted that the cost of upgrading technology to better serve global business travelers was a factor in the decision to sell. American Express had much to gain from the purchase. Already gigantic--with over 1,700 travel offices in more than 120 nations--American Express would boost its annual sales an additional 33 percent with this new division. The acquisition also had significant prestige value. Although American Express had recently snapped up five other large agencies, the Cook deal was to be the largest takeover in the history of the travel industry.

The transaction was finalized in September 1994 with American Express paying $375 million for the company. Although they had relinquished their ownership interests, the Pareskys remained involved in the business. Both were appointed vice-presidents, and in 1995, David Paresky was reported to be 'in line' to become president of American Express Travel.

American Express also moved to acquire the corporate accounts of The Thomas Cook Group Ltd. (which represented about ten percent of the British company's total revenues). While this segment of the business was lucrative, The Group was willing to part with it to in order to concentrate on servicing leisure travelers and on its burgeoning financial services division. However, American Express was not able to obtain from The Group the rights to the venerable Thomas Cook name. The Pareskys' licensing agreement had been due to expire in 1999, and, according to the Guardian , The Thomas Cook Group Ltd. took immediate steps to secure a new licensee. As a result, all former Thomas Cook offices were to be re-christened American Express.

Source: International Directory of Company Histories , Vol. 33. St. James Press, 2000.

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Thomas Cook: The Baptist Preacher Who Invented Modern Tourism

• by history tools
• May 26, 2024

In the annals of business history, few individuals can claim to have truly revolutionized an industry and transformed how people live. But the story of Thomas Cook, the Victorian-era Baptist preacher turned travel entrepreneur, is one of remarkable vision, timing, and impact. From humble beginnings arranging teetotaler train outings, Cook would go on to found the world‘s first travel agency, bring affordable leisure travel to the masses, and lay the groundwork for today‘s $7 trillion global tourism industry.

Trains, Temperance, and a Travel Epiphany

Building on this insight, Cook began offering similar low-cost train excursions for temperance societies and Sunday schools around the English Midlands. An 1845 trip from Leicester to Liverpool marked the first "package tour" open to the general public. For one guinea (£1.05) passengers received train transport, meals, and a detailed handbook – a formula that would become the basis for mass tourism.

Table 1. Early Thomas Cook Excursions. Adapted from Swinglehurst, 1974.[^2]

Package Tours for the People

As Thomas Cook‘s tours expanded in the 1850s and 60s, so did their popularity and affordability. A growing British middle class with rising incomes and more leisure time eagerly embraced Cook‘s excursions as an escape from the drudgeries of industrial life. Cook‘s pioneering use of standardized hotel coupons, travelers cheques, and economies of scale to reduce costs made travel accessible to more than just wealthy elites for the first time.

Table 2. Growth of British Middle Class, 1851-1901. Adapted from Cannadine, 2005.[^4]

"Cook-ing" the World: Packaged Exoticism and Empire

The explosion of middle class wealth and leisure coincided with Britain reaching the heights of its imperial power, as Queen Victoria was crowned Empress of India in 1876. Thomas Cook & Son capitalized on and enabled this moment, offering tours to far-flung locales from Egypt to India to New Zealand, often in close coordination with British colonial administrators.

John Mason Cook, who assumed control of the company in the 1870s, called the British Empire "‘the best friend‘ the tourist business ever had," and under his watch the company became a "virtual tool of the Empire."[^5] Their trips abroad reflected and reinforced the colonial mindset of the day, packaging and commodifying foreign cultures for British tourist consumption. Travelers were whisked from site to site to marvel at "exotic" peoples and places, while enjoying all the comforts of home.

A Lasting Legacy

Though Thomas Cook‘s Victorian-era tours may seem quaint by today‘s standards, his impact on modern tourism is hard to overstate. Cook‘s innovations like package tours, hotel coupons, and traveler‘s cheques made travel more efficient, affordable, and accessible, setting the mold for the industry over the next century and beyond.

Cook also played a key role in shifting attitudes about leisure travel, helping to democratize what had once been an elite pursuit. As historian Jill Hamilton argues, the "social revolution" of expanding travel to the middle class was "a phenomenon as great as the political revolutions" of the 19th century.[^7] By 1914, an estimated one million Britons traveled abroad each year, compared to around 10,000 a century earlier.

Despite its ignominious collapse in 2019, Thomas Cook‘s contributions continue to shape our world, from the package tours and all-inclusive resorts of today to government policies promoting mass tourism. Its rise, decline, and enduring influence offer a window into the birth of modern travel, and the social and economic forces that powered it. In many ways, we are all still traveling with Thomas Cook.

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The history of Thomas Cook, from tours for teetotallers to boozy packages in Spain

Thomas Cook, one of Britain’s oldest travel companies, ceased trading last night. Here, Chris Leadbeater recalls a trip down memory lane with the company’s archivist

T homas Cook. The two words have become synonymous with the modern concept of package travel, but they come with plenty of heritage. The company can trace its origins back 178 years, when the very first tour was organised by a Leicestershire printer who could not have envisaged that his simple scheme would become a colossal company.

Born in the Derbyshire market town of Melbourne in 1808, Thomas Cook was a man of religious conviction who, in 1841, began dabbling in transport plans for his fellow followers of the temperance (abstinence from alcohol) movement. That first jaunt was a rail hop from Leicester to Loughborough – but operations quickly expanded beyond local trains. A tour to Liverpool, just four years on, was booked by 1,200 people. It was so popular that Cook had to repeat it, for 800 further customers, a fortnight later.

The brand has survived two world wars, the reigns of six British monarchs, the rise and fall of the Soviet bloc and numerous changes to how we live. Not least the invention of flight. 

“The company has witnessed a good deal,” says Paul Smith, the company’s archivist, picking up a brochure which marks one of the moments when British tourists became airborne. “Thomas Cook was the first travel agent to market pleasure flights,” he adds. “We placed an advert in The Times in Easter 1919. And we produced this.” It is, in truth, an unremarkable testament to so seismic a time – a pamphlet in drab olive-brown, a photograph of a converted First World War Handley Page bomber as a sole cover photograph. But the dream it is selling is there in the few metres of space between the plane’s wheels and the ground, a new era dawned.

There are plenty of other such echoes of a changing planet in Paul’s boxes and files. A 1928 brochure sings of the good days just before the Wall Street Crash, touting a tie-in between Thomas Cook and Cunard which started and ended in New York. It journeyed through the Caribbean and down the flank of South America to Buenos Aires, headed across the Atlantic to Cape Town, turned north along the torso of Africa in search of Cairo – then returned to the Big Apple via Naples, Monte Carlo and Madeira. The price for this princely expedition is listed as US$5,000 – around £50,000 today, Paul estimates.

Other artefacts retreat into the 19th century. The brochure that the firm produced in 1868 – the second time such literature was published after an initial experiment in 1865 proved successful – is a thing of joy, more geography textbook than promotional spiel. It is filled with maps which chart available travel routes, red lines spider-webbing across Europe to Rouen and Paris, Bologna and Florence. A reproduction of a Thomas Cook “circular note” – an in-house version of the traveller’s cheque – recalls a move into currency transactions in 1874. A “Nile Season: 1896-97” brochure salutes the rise of river cruising.

Further items shed breezy light onto the 20th century – a Fifties belle adorning a pamphlet for the company’s Prestatyn holiday camp that shouts: “This Is It! Your 1954 Holiday”; a 1963 brochure, disguised as a women’s magazine called “Holidaymaking”, firmly aimed at female decision-makers in evolving households; big hair and palm trees for gaudy 1985, youthful romance on a Greek island for 1996. Others deal in shadows – instructions on how to use the “Enemy Mail Service” that Thomas Cook helped to run in the Second World War, deploying company connections to deliver letters to people in occupied lands.

The company has, of course, also changed after nearly two centuries. The Cook family sold it in 1928, and it has seen subsequent periods of national as well as private ownership. “But we’ve been trading under the same name throughout,” Paul adds. “Those two words ‘Thomas Cook’ have been there since Day One.” He of all people would know.

A brief history of Thomas Cook

Thomas Cook started organising leisure trips in the summer of 1841 when its founder, who gave his name to the company, organised a successful one-day rail excursion at a shilling a head from Leicester to Loughborough. During the next three summers Mr Cook arranged a succession of trips, taking passengers to Leicester, Nottingham, Derby and Birmingham. Four years later, he organised his first trip abroad, taking a group from Leicester to Calais. This was followed in the 1860s by trips to Switzerland, Italy, Egypt and America. 

In partnership with his son, John Mason Cook, he opened an office in Fleet Street in 1865. In accordance with his beliefs, Mr Cook senior and his wife also ran a small temperance hotel above the office. The firm’s growing importance was demonstrated in 1884, when it transported a relief force to rescue General Gordon, from Khartoum, in Sudan.

In 1869, he hired two steamers and conducted his first party up the Nile. The climax of his career, however, came in September 1872 when, at the age of 63, he departed from Leicester on a tour of the world that would keep him away from home for almost eight months. It had long been his ambition to travel “to Egypt via China”, but such a trip only became practicable at the end of 1869 following the opening of the Suez Canal and the completion of a rail network linking the east and west coasts of America.

The company was incorporated as Thos Cook & Son Ltd in 1924, and in 1926 the headquarters moved from Ludgate Circus to Berkeley Street, Mayfair, a once aristocratic area which was now the centre of London society. Then, in 1928, Thomas Cook’s surviving grandsons, Frank and Ernest, unexpectedly sold the business to the Belgian Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits et des Grands Express Européens, operators of most of Europe’s luxury sleeping cars, including the Orient Express.

Thomas Cook was nationalised shortly after the Second World War when it became part of the state-owned British Railways. It benefited from a holiday boom after the conflict, which saw one million Britons travelling abroad by 1950.

In 1965, Thomas Cook's profits exceeded £1m for the first time, but it was facing stiff competition from younger rivals.

It was privatised in the 1970s with Midland Bank becoming its sole owner in 1977. Thomas Cook managed to survive the recession of the 1970s – a recession that witnessed the collapse of several travel firms – and enhanced its reputation for providing excellent service by launching a Money Back Guarantee scheme in 1974. It was sold by Midland in 1992 to a German bank and charter airline.

C&N Touristic AG, one of Germany’s largest travel groups, became the sole owner of Thomas Cook in 2001 and a new chapter in the company’s history began. Within a matter of months, C&N Touristic AG had changed its name to Thomas Cook AG and launched a new logo and brand identity. In the UK, Thomas Cook introduced its new three-tier mass-market brand strategy – Thomas Cook, JMC and Sunset – and the newly-branded Thomas Cook Airlines was launched in March 2003. 

Thomas Cook, one of the world’s biggest leisure travel groups, with sales of £7.8 billion, 19 million annual customers and 22,000 employees, ceased trading in September 2019. 

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The History Hit Miscellany of Facts, Figures and Fascinating Finds

Thomas Cook and the Invention of Mass Tourism in Victorian Britain

Harry Sherrin

03 mar 2022.

After its inception in the mid-19th century, the travel agency Thomas Cook pioneered the development of mass tourism, launching the world’s first travel guidebooks, package holidays and round-the-world tours.

Thomas Cook grew from humble beginnings, carrying temperance activists to meetings by train in the English Midlands, into a vast multinational company. In the 19th century, its tours catered to increasingly wealthy Victorians during the height of the British Empire , successfully championing a travel revolution.

But in 2019, Thomas Cook declared bankruptcy. It was the world’s oldest and longest-serving tour operator at the time, having existed for more than a century and a half and endured world wars, economic crises and the rise of the internet.

Here’s the story of Thomas Cook and the advent of global mass tourism.

Temperance trips

Thomas Cook (1808-1892), a devout Christian and advocate of the temperance movement, organised a one-day rail excursion for a temperance meeting in 1841. The trip, on 5 July, involved a train journey between Leicester and Loughborough, courtesy of an arrangement with the Midland Counties Railway Company.

Cook continued this practice over the following years, organising railway journeys for temperance activist groups around the Midlands of England. In 1845, he organised his first for-profit excursion, in the form of a trip to Liverpool for passengers from three locations – Derby, Nottingham and Leicester.

For this tour, Cook crafted a passengers’ handbook, now widely considered a precursor to the popular travel guidebook that would be produced to accompany travel excursions for decades to follow.

Branching out to Europe

English tourist agent Thomas Cook and party in the ruins of Pompeii, Easter 1868. Cook is seated on the ground, just to right of center, in this carte-de-visite photograph.

Image Credit: Granger Historical Picture Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

By the 1850s, Cook had his sights set further afield than England. For the Paris Exposition of 1855 , for example, he organised guided trips from Leicester to Calais.

That same year, he also oversaw international ‘package’ tours, carrying parties from England to various cities in Europe, including Brussels, Strasbourg, Cologne and Paris . These excursions offered passengers everything needed to sustain them on their journeys, including transport, accommodation and meals.

By the 1860s, Cook’s sporadic temperance trips had grown into a profitable mass tourism operation – thought to be the first in global history. In response to his newfound success, Cook opened his first high-street store in London’s Fleet Street in 1865.

That same year, the London Underground opened as the first subterranean railway in the world. London was the most populous city on the planet at the time, and the enterprises of the British Empire saw wealth pouring into mainland Britain. With this came disposable income and, by extension, more Britons willing to spend large sums on international holidays.

For Cook, business was booming.

Going global

After tackling Europe, Thomas Cook went global. Now a father-son business comprising Thomas Cook and his son, John Mason Cook, the tour agency launched its first US tour in 1866. John Mason guided it personally.

A few years later, Thomas Cook escorted passengers on the company’s first trip to North Africa and the Middle East, stopping in Egypt and Palestine.

Tourism for Britons at the time was intimately tied to the endeavours of the British Empire. As British armies entered Egypt and Sudan in the late 19th century, so too did tourists, traders, teachers and missionaries, eager to capitalise on the newfound accessibility of far-flung nations and the relative safety offered by the presence of British forces there.

Thomas Cook and Son was even responsible for delivering military personnel and mail to British Egypt in the late 19th century.

1872 marked a huge moment in the history of Thomas Cook and indeed global tourism. That year, Thomas Cook escorted the first known round-the-world tour. The lengthy excursion, which lasted more than 200 days and covered nearly 30,000 miles, was targeted at wealthy Victorians – those with the time, funds and proclivity to see the world’s many cultures.

In that decade, Thomas Cook also helped invent the traveler’s cheque: the company offered a ‘Circular Note’ to its passengers which could be exchanged for currency around the world.

In the 1920s, Thomas Cook and Son launched the first-known tour through Africa. The excursion lasted some 5 months and took passengers from Cairo in Egypt down to the Cape of Good Hope.

Conquering air and sea

John Mason Cook took over primary leadership of the company in the 1870s, overseeing its continued expansion and the opening of various new offices around the world.

With this expansion came the launching of Thomas Cook’s company-owned steamers in the late 19th century. In 1886, a fleet of luxury steamers opened to passengers, offering cruises along the Nile.

A Thomas Cook flyer from 1922 advertising cruises down the Nile. This kind of travel has been immortalised in works such as ‘Death on the Nile’ by Agatha Christie.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Thomas Cook eventually took to the skies in the 1920s, overseeing its first guided tour involving air travel in 1927. The trip carried 6 passengers from New York to Chicago, and also included accommodation and tickets for a Chicago boxing fight.

Into the modern era

During World War Two , Thomas Cook was briefly enlisted to assist with the ‘enemy mail service’, essentially the covert delivery of post from Allied regions to occupied territories.

The company went on to change hands several times during the 20th century, yet it managed to stay afloat despite various buyouts, economic crises and the rise of online travel agents.

In 2019, Thomas Cook was handed a bill of some £200 million by the Royal Bank of Scotland and other financial institutions. Unable to source the funds, the company declared bankruptcy.

At the time, Thomas Cook was responsible for more than 150,000 holiday-goers abroad. When the company collapsed, new arrangements had to be made to return every stranded customer home. The UK Civil Aviation Authority, which assisted with the repatriation efforts, called it the largest-ever peacetime repatriation in British history.

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A history of British travel: a look back at Thomas Cook's vintage posters

Thomas cook's history dates back 178 years.

A vintage Thomas Cook travel poster from the Edwardian era. Getty Images

"A Cook's ticket brings the world to you," an Atlas-inspired poster, dating back to the British Edwardian era, proclaims.

The statement is a reminder of the travel company Thomas Cook's long history, and today it has announced that it has ceased operations  after 178 years of booking holidays.

Click through the gallery above to see a collection of the travel agency's past vintage posters.

From promoting travel to the "Continent" for ski trips, to advertising Nile cruises and steamship journeys to Jamaica, the posters paint a picture of the travel company's turn-of-the-century glory days, as well as colonial-era Britain's view of some destinations.

The travel agency has archived the posters from their 178 years of travel, and three years ago, when it celebrated its 175th anniversary, it released a special collection of the illustrations.

History of Thomas Cook

Known as the company that commodified "mass travel" for Brits, travel agent Thomas Cook began by organising his first trip, between the English cities of Leicester and Loughborough in 1841.

By 1845, he was arranging trips between England and Scotland for groups of travellers.

It was 14 years before the company went international, offering "continental tours" from the English county of Essex to Antwerp in Belgium. The same trip took travellers to Brussels, before going on to Cologne and Heidelberg, Germany.

In 1865, the very first Thomas Cook high-street shop opened in London’s Fleet Street. It would be the first of hundreds of stores where British holidaymakers would flock in the hope of seeing the world.

The company led its first trip to America in 1866, followed by a tour of Palestine and Egypt in 1866. In 1873, Cook completed his first round-the-globe tour. The adventure was called the London to London tour. It took 222 days, covered more than 29,000 miles and cost around 200 guineas.

Thomas Cook can also be credited with the first iteration of the traveller’s cheque. The company introduced circular notes in 1874 as a simple way for travellers to have access to money in foreign countries.

Along the way, the Thomas Cook logo has seen plenty of different forms:

In 1892, Thomas Cook passed away. His son Mason Cook would follow him to his grave just seven years later. At that point, the company passed to Mason Cook’s three sons who embraced their family’s travel-focussed footsteps. The trio organised the first escorted tour through Africa, a five -month tour that started in Cairo and ended in Cape Town.

Then, one hundred years ago, it was time to take to the skies and the company organised its first air tour, flying passengers from New York to Chicago and throwing in ringside seats for the Dempsey-Tunney heavyweight boxing contest.

Not long after, the Cook family sold the business to the then owners of the Orient Express. By 1950, more than a million British holidaymakers were booking with Thomas Cook to travel abroad each year.

In 2003, the newly branded Thomas Cook airlines was launched and by 2019 the company had 560 stores around the UK. Sadly with today’s announcement it seems that the travels are finally over for Thomas Cook.

Thomas Cook's new owner creates 1,500 new jobs

• Published 21 November 2019

John and Irene Hays of Hays Travel rescued 555 Thomas Cook shops

Hays Travel, which bought Thomas Cook after it collapsed, has announced plans to hire an extra 1,500 staff.

The travel agent has already taken on 2,330 former Thomas Cook employees.

But now Hays plans to hire another 200 people at its head office in Sunderland, an extra 500 to handle foreign exchange, and an apprentice at each of its 737 branches.

The move has been seen as a vote of confidence in the package holiday market.

Hays took on all of Thomas Cook's 555 shops in October after the travel agent spectacularly collapsed earlier this year.

Thomas Cook buyers pledge to save 2,500 jobs

Who are the family buying Thomas Cook shops?

Since then it has reopened 450 of those stores and hired a lot of its old staff.

But now it is expanding further.

John Hays, who runs the travel agent with his wife Irene, said: "We're further increasing staffing to ensure we have the highest customer service levels across all of our stores and our head office functions."

He said applicants didn't need experience in the sector "just an enthusiasm for travel".

The hiring spree will take Hays' workforce to 5,700 people.

"The former Thomas Cook managers have said the biggest difference for them is being empowered and valued - as an independent travel agent they are not tied to certain products or scripts and they feel trusted," Mr Hays said.

"This is a key principle of our business."

It is the latest sign of renewed confidence in the package holiday business.

Earlier this week, EasyJet announced plans to relaunch its own package holiday operation in a bid to fill the gap in the market left by Thomas Cook.

About 20 million people fly with EasyJet to Europe annually but only 500,000 book accommodation through it.

More on this story

• Published 9 October 2019

Thomas Cook shops saved in takeover by rival

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