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Thomas Cook

2021 marks the 180th anniversary of Thomas Cook’s first step towards building the package holiday phenomenon. Through Thomas Cook’s belief in temperance and education he grew a travel company so all classes could enjoy the luxury of a holiday…

Shona Parker

2021 marked the 180th anniversary of Thomas Cook’s first step towards building the package holiday phenomenon. But ironically, wealth and social standing was the last thing on Thomas’ mind throughout his varied and illustrious career.

“We carried music with us, and music met us at Loughborough Station … and cheered us all along the line with the heartiest welcome … the whole affair being one which excited extraordinary interest, not only in the county of Leicester but throughout the whole country … All went off in the best style … and thus was struck the keynote of my excursions, and the social idea grew upon me.”

Thus wrote an exuberant Thomas Cook after his first organised day out for working class people of the Temperance Movement on 5th July 1841. A society devoted to encouraging others to give up alcohol and to try education instead, the Temperance members organised meetings, readings and family picnics as an alternative to hours spent in a pub. A member of the movement himself, Thomas decided to try something bigger to spread the word.

A fervent Baptist, Thomas believed in people helping themselves but recognised they could only do this if they were given the education and opportunity. At the same time, he surmised that travel educated a person by broadening their mind and firing the imagination, relaxing people and giving them hope. So he hoped to practise his ideas by arranging for 500 working class people to travel by train from Leicester to Loughborough to visit the Temperance quarterly meeting.

For most of his passengers, this was their first time on a train. Despite travelling Third Class in open air carriages, the whole trip was imbued with a holiday atmosphere, with villagers waving flags at the side of the tracks and Loughborough station decorated with banners, flags and props.

Mr Paget, a local dignitary, opened up his property Southfields for the day-trippers to use. White tablecloths were laid out under the shelter of trees and a typical English picnic of bread and ham and later crumpets and cake was consumed. Family games were arranged, and a cricket match enjoyed before minister after minister made rousing speeches accompanied by the band. It was the biggest teetotal party they had ever seen.

Thomas always wanted to help the poorer people in society as he had encountered his fair share of hardship. His father and stepfather both died when he was young and 10-year-old Thomas was apprenticed to a carpenter, working long hours and spending his free time in church. He grew up wanting a fairer society and a better democracy.

After Thomas married Marianne Mason in 1833, they opened up their home in Leicester to temperance travellers, as local inns were noisy, dirty, expensive and full of drunks. Leicester, like many towns in the north of England, had low life expectancy due to poor sanitation, a lack of freshwater reservoirs, hardly any drainage and an excess of factory pollution in the river Soar. It did a roaring trade in shoes and hosiery so there was the inevitable Victorian slum housing.

According to the Temperance Messenger magazine, Leicester was also home to 700 spirit shops, beer shops and pubs. It claimed the town had an above average amount of drunkards, prostitutes and cases of alcohol related diseases.

Fired up by the success of his first trip, Thomas set to organising more cheap Temperance days out for the working classes, volunteering his time and his own money to ensure success. Trips to Derby, Birmingham and Nottingham ensued, all underpinned by Thomas’ belief in feeding the soul with education and relaxation. In the summer of 1843, he took a crowd of Leicester teetotallers to the peaks of Derbyshire and parts of Yorkshire to breathe uncontaminated air.

Thomas tirelessly promoted his trips by printing and distributing leaflets and posters throughout the town. He gave promotional talks in the local Temperance Hall. In fact, although Thomas’s May Day trip wasn’t the first organised excursion by rail, it was the first to be promoted through the use of print material and proved a resounding success.

Thomas’ help for the working class didn’t stop at organising days out for them to try to forget their worries. He deeply abhorred alcohol and blamed it for the many problems the poor faced during the hungry Forties. He was a voracious anti-Corn Law protestor and orator, damning the use of cereal crops to make alcohol when hundreds of thousands of people were starving across the country.

He also promoted gardening, a new Victorian pastime, and bought potato seeds to distribute among the working class to encourage them to grow their own food. He even started printing a gardening magazine called The Cottage Gardener, covering the basics on how to grow vegetables and cultivate a cottage garden, although the copies no longer exist. He went onto help found the Leicester Allotment Society as another way of helping the poor to be fed but self-sufficient.

All this work came at the expense of Thomas’s own pocket and in August 1846 he filed for bankruptcy. Luckily, this no longer meant the shame and prison sentence it used to, and Thomas held onto his printing works and his home. This did teach him a valuable lesson though: he needed to make a hefty profit to continue helping the poor, and the best way to do this was to organise excursions for the middle classes.

Thomas had already decided to take the plunge in 1845, when he gathered up his courage and advertised his first commercial tour to Liverpool, with the opportunities to climb Mount Snowdon, explore Bangor and sail in a steamboat along the way, all backed up with his printed historical booklets. Despite tickets costing 10-15 shillings each, so clearly aimed at the middle class, demand for this trip far outstripped supply and another was planned a fortnight later. Thomas had found his niche. Cook’s Tours was born.

Although the company went on to become a package holiday phenomenon, Thomas never cared for gentrification. Large houses, country pursuits and members clubs passed him by as he continued to promote cheap travel for the masses.

In fact, he fell out with his son, as John Mason wanted to stop all non-profit making tours, but this went against everything Thomas stood for. He said of his son, “He does not like my mixing of missions with business; but he cannot deprive me of the pleasure I have had in the combination.”

Thomas’ last act of philanthropy was to build a pretty row of 14 memorial cottages and gardens in Melbourne, alongside a Baptist hall, a bakery and a laundry. Four flats were included for visiting Baptist ministers and their families, and a caretaker oversaw the upkeep.

When Thomas died on 18th July 1892, he had just £2731 in his bank.

William Gladstone summed up Thomas Cook in the Leicester Daily Post on the 20th July: “Thousands and thousands of the inhabitants of these islands who never would for a moment have passed beyond its shores have been able to go and return in safety and comfort, and with great enjoyment, great refreshment and great improvement to themselves.”

Written by Shona Parker. I blog about the social history behind the novels studied for GCSE English and drama at www.backinthedayof.co.uk. I include the type of social, political and economical paraphernalia which will pad out your knowledge and understanding, dispel your misgivings and make English history come alive!

Published: May 3rd, 2021.

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Thomas Cook: A timeline of the world’s oldest tour operator

Simon calder explores 10 key years that tell the story of the legacy travel company, article bookmarked.

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As we say goodbye to the world’s oldest tour operator, here are the most important years in Thomas Cook ’s illustrious history.

1841: Rail revolution

Thomas Cook single-handedly industrialises railway tourism – chartering a train to take 500 passengers about 10 miles from Leicester to the neighbouring town of Loughborough on Monday 5 July.

The fare for the round-trip is one shilling and sixpence (7.5p). A spiritual and abstinent man, Cook organised the trip to attend a Temperance meeting. But for many of the participants, the attraction was the opportunity to travel by train for the first time.

1855: Cook goes international

The international exposition in Paris, set in the dramatic surroundings of Baron Haussmann’s newly redrawn city, provided the perfect target for Thomas Cook’s first international expedition. The steadily rising incomes and increased aspirations of the middle classes brought about by the industrial revolution convinced Cook that there would be a market for trips from London to Paris.

He offered a complete holiday “package” (comprising travel and accommodation, as well as meals) for the first time.

1865: A travel agent is born

Thomas Cook opens a travel agency in Fleet Street, central London. It coincides with the opening of the London Underground, the world’s first subterranean railway.

1874: Cheque it out

“Cook’s Circular Note,” the prototype of the traveller’s cheque, is launched – providing a safe and easy way to carry funds abroad.

1892: Next generation

Thomas Cook dies in Leicester. The business is taken on by his son, John Mason Cook – whose initials are later used for a rebrand of the firm’s package holidays (an experiment which is swiftly and expensively reversed).

1928: Up for sale

The last two Cooks, Thomas’s grandsons Frank and Ernest, retire. They sell the business to the first of many outside owners, the railway sleeping car firm Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits.

1948: Nationalisation

During the nationalisation of the UK’s railways, Thomas Cook somewhat bizarrely also becomes state-owned. Two years later, the first, embryonic mass-market package holidays by air are sold by a young man called Vladimir Raitz – comprising flights from Gatwick to Corsica, a tent on a beach and non-rationed meals.

1972: Staying the course

Thomas Cook reverts to the private sector, with the Midland Bank, hoteliers Trust House Forte and the Automobile Association buying the firm. Two years, the economic gloom of the “Three-day Week” precipitated by a miners’ strike, amplified by the Middle East oil crisis, finished off many travel companies. But not Thomas Cook.

1992: New owners

A German consortium, comprising Westdeutsche Landesbank and the LTU Group, acquire the Thomas Cook Group.

2019: It's all over

The Thomas Cook Group, by now an Anglo-German firm, ceases trading at 2am on Monday, 23 September

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History Hit Story of England: Making of a Nation

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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21 Ridiculous Complaints from Travelers & Tour Vacationers

1. “I think it should be explained in the brochure that the local convenience store does not sell proper biscuits like custard creams or ginger nuts

2. “It’s lazy of the local shopkeepers in Puerto Vallarta to close in the afternoons. I often needed to buy things during ‘siesta’ time — this should be banned.”

3. “On my holiday to Goa in India , I was disgusted to find that almost every restaurant served curry. I don’t like spicy food.”

4. “We booked an excursion to a water park but no-one told us we had to bring our own swimsuits and towels. We assumed it would be included in the price”

5. “The beach was too sandy. We had to clean everything when we returned to our room.”

6. “We found the sand was not like the sand in the brochure. Your brochure shows the sand as white but it was more yellow.”

7. “They should not allow topless sunbathing on the beach. It was very distracting for my husband who just wanted to relax.”

8. “No-one told us there would be fish in the water. The children were scared.”

9. “Although the brochure said that there was a fully equipped kitchen, there was no egg-slicer in the drawers.”

10. “We went on holiday to Spain and had a problem with the taxi drivers as they were all Spanish.”

11. “The roads were uneven and bumpy, so we could not read the local guide book during the bus ride to the resort. Because of this, we were unaware of many things that would have made our holiday more fun.”

12. “It took us nine hours to fly home from Jamaica to England . It took the Americans only three hours to get home. This seems unfair.”

13. “I compared the size of our one-bedroom suite to our friends’ three-bedroom and ours was significantly smaller.”

14. “The brochure stated: ‘No hairdressers at the resort’. We’re trainee hairdressers and we think they knew and made us wait longer for service.”

15. “There were too many Spanish people there. The receptionist spoke Spanish, the food was Spanish. No one told us that there would be so many foreigners.”

16. “We had to line up outside to catch the boat and there was no air-conditioning.”

17. “It is your duty as a tour operator to advise us of noisy or unruly guests before we travel.”

18. “I was bitten by a mosquito. The brochure did not mention mosquitoes.”

19. “My fiancé and I requested twin-beds when we booked, but instead we were placed in a room with a king bed. We now hold you responsible and want to be re-reimbursed for the fact that I became pregnant. This would not have happened if you had put us in the room that we booked.”

20. “We bought ‘Ray-Ban’ sunglasses for five euros from a street trader, only to find out they were fake.”

21. “While staying at the Game Lodge overlooking a water hole, we spotted a visibly aroused elephant. The sight of the animal ruined my honeymoon by making me feel inadequate.”

• The Most Ridiculous Passenger Complaints
• Hilarious Airline Complaint Letter Republished by Richard Branson

The responses below are not provided or commissioned by the bank advertiser. Responses have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by the bank advertiser. It is not the bank advertiser's responsibility to ensure all posts and/or questions are answered.

Adam is the proud Founder and CEO of both Point Me to the Plane and point.me . An international consultant turned TV programming strategist, Adam currently works full-time on both websites. His obsession with points and miles dates back to his freshman year at college. After browsing Flyertalk and Mileage Workshop, Adam pulled the trigger and signed up for his first Citibank AAdvantage credit card and MCI phone line (yes, landlines still existed). Back then, both deals were churnable and in no time at all, the college freshman had enough miles to travel to Europe and Asia in First Class for free, multiple times. Needless to say, he was hooked! Fast forward a few years and Adam of course ended up in a career with a heavy travel requirement…which meant extra miles for awards! As his colleagues and friends started to hear about and see pictures from his trips, they wanted in on the secret and Adam began to assist them with their bookings, Juicy Miles was born. At the same time, Adam started an email newsletter to prevent those less obsessed co-workers from squandering their point collection opportunities. The bi-weekly email covered everything from upcoming promotions, guidance on maximizing points, and redemption advice. The distribution quickly expanded outside the office and Point Me to the Plane became a BoardingArea blog.

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Australia’s air and tourism industries need government-backed insolvency insurance. Here’s why

Adjunct Fellow Management & Tourism, University of Technology Sydney

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David Beirman is affiliated in an honorary basis with DFAT's Consular Consulting Group, a stakeholder group which advises DFAT on government travel advisories and broader issues of tourism safety and security.

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Australia has a long history of domestic airlines collapsing, often affecting thousands of travellers, yet the industry provides little or no recompense.

Even the federal government’s recently released aviation discussion paper recognised the need for change by recommending important protections for passengers. These included making airlines honour refunds if flights were cancelled or significantly delayed.

The 2024 Aviation White Paper included the most consumer friendly proposals in 30 years. However, there was one significant omission in the 156-page report.

There was no mention of insolvency protection for airline passengers. To put it simply, if a domestic or international airline collapses there is little likelihood passengers who paid airfares will receive a refund.

In most cases, passengers affected by airline collapses receive little or no compensation. Fewer than 20% of Australian domestic passengers pay for domestic travel insurance compared to the 90% of Australians who buy insurance when they fly internationally.

A history of failed airlines

Since 1990 we have seen the rise and fall of multiple Australian airlines . This includes Compass Mark 1, Compass Mark 2, Ansett Airlines, Impulse Air and Aussie Air.

In May, Bonza collapsed after less than a year of operation. And more recently, services operated by REX (Regional Air Express) between capital cities stopped and its regional services are under pressure.

Virgin and Qantas immediately volunteered to honour the inter-city bookings of some REX ticket holders. However, nearly all affected Bonza passengers lost their money because no other airlines flew the same routes.

The risk of both domestic and international airline collapses affecting Australian travellers is real. Consumers are as entitled to be protected from that risk as they are from many other travel related risks.

The UK and European approach

The UK approach to insolvency insurance has worked well since 1973. The UK scheme is known as “ATOL” or Air Travel Operators Licence . It applies to package tour companies who sell air travel combined with land tours or accommodation

This user-pays, government-guaranteed insurance cover is compulsory for all British travellers who book a package tour. It costs only A$5 per person. It guarantees a full refund and return flights to the passenger’s point of origin if the tour operator goes out of business.

A similar scheme has operated in the European Union since 1990, its known as the European Package Travel Directive .

As part of a 2024 book I co-edited with Bruce Prideaux, I focused on the collapse of the famous British tour operator, Thomas Cook in 2019.

I also compared insolvency consumer protection in the UK with that of Australia and New Zealand.

The Thomas Cook experience

When Thomas Cook collapsed in the United Kingdom and Europe, 600,000 British and European Union passengers were fully refunded the cost of their tours and flown to their port of departure under their regions’ respective schemes. And the cost of their disrupted tours was refunded.

Funding built into the UK scheme covered full refunds to affected passengers at negligible cost to government which guaranteed the scheme.

By contrast, a far smaller collapse of two Australian based tour operators, Tempo Holidays and Bentours in September 2019 affected fewer than 1,000 passengers.

However not all the affected travellers were refunded due to the limitations of the insolvency scheme run by what was then the Australian Federation of Travel Agents.

Under this scheme travellers only receive insolvency protection if they pay by credit or debit card. There is a reliance on banks to refund if a tour operator becomes insolvent. If the passenger paid for their tour by cheque or cash, no refund applied.

What Australia needs

There are three key categories of business insolvency which affect travellers. The collapse of an airline, the collapse of a tour operator and the collapse of a travel agent.

If the Australian government is genuinely interested in protecting travel consumers at minimal cost to the taxpayer we should be using the UK and European schemes as a model.

A compulsory user-pays, government guaranteed insolvency protection scheme would cost the consumer very little and would be an ideal safety net for consumers in the event that their travel company goes bust.

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