Thomas Cook
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Religious and Pleasure Excursions
His idea to offer excursions came to him while waiting for the stagecoach on the London Road at Kibworth. With the opening of the extended Midland Counties Railway, he arranged to take a group of 570 temperance campaigners from Leicester to a rally in Loughborough, eleven miles away. On 5 July 1841, Thomas Cook arranged for the rail company to charge one shilling per person that included rail tickets and food for this train journey. Cook was paid a share of the fares actually charged to the passengers, as the railway tickets, being legal contracts between company and passenger, could not have been issued at his own price. During the following three summers he planned and conducted outings for temperance societies and Sunday-school children. In 1844 the Midland Counties Railway Company agreed to make a permanent arrangement with him provided he found the passengers. This success lead him to start his own business running rail excursions for pleasure, taking a percentage of the railway tickets.
On 4 August 1845 he arranged accommodation for a party to travel from Leicester to Liverpool. In 1846, he took 350 people from Leicester on a tour of Scotland, however his lack of commercial ability lead him to bankruptcy. He persisted and had success when he claimed that he arranged for over 165,000 people to attend the Great Exhibition. Four years later, he planned his first excursion abroad, when he took a group from Leicester to Calais to coincide with the Paris Exhibition. The following year he started his 'grand circular tours' of Europe. During the 1860s he took parties to Switzerland, Italy, Egypt and USA. Cook established 'inclusive independent travel', whereby the traveller went independently but his agency charged for travel, food and accommodation for a fixed period over any chosen route. Such was his success that the Scottish Railway companies withdrew their support between 1862 and 1863 to try the excursion business for themselves.
Thomas Cook and Son
With his only son, John Mason Cook, he formed a partnership and renamed the travel agency as Thomas Cook and Son. They acquired business premises on Fleet Street, London. By this time, Cook had stopped personal tours and became an agent for foreign or domestic travel. Thomas saw his venture as both religious and social service; his son provided the commercial expertise that allowed the company to expand. Their business model was refined by the introduction of the 'hotel coupon' in 1866. Detachable coupons in a counterfoil book were issued to the traveller. These were valid for either a restaurant meal or an overnight hotel stay provided they were on Cook's list. A round the world tour started in 1872, which for 200 guineas, included a steamship across the Atlantic, a stage coach across America, a paddle steamer to Japan, and an overland journey across China and India.
Conflicts of interest between father and son were resolved when the son persuaded his father, Thomas Cook, to retire in 1879. He moved back to Leicestershire and lived quietly until his death. The firm's growth was consolidated by John Mason Cook and his two sons, especially by its involvement with military transport and postal services for Britain and Egypt during the 1880s. By 1888, the company had established offices around the world, including three in Australia and one in Auckland, New Zealand. John Mason Cook promoted, and even led, excursions to, for example, the Middle East. However, while arranging for the German Emperor Wilhelm II to visit Palestine in 1898, he contracted dysentery and died the following year. His sons, Frank and Ernest, were not nearly as successful running the business. Despite opening a new headquarters in Berkeley Square, London in 1926, ownership of Thomas Cook and Son only remained with the family until 1928, when it was sold to the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits. After the outbreak of World War II, the Paris headquarters of the Wagons-Lits company was seized by the occupying forces, and in turn the British assets were requisitioned by the Government. In 1941, the centenary of the company, Thomas Cook & Son Ltd. was sold to the four major railway companies.
Company Ownership
The company was nationalised in 1948 as part of the British Transport Commission. In the early 1950s, the company began promoting 'foreign holidays' (particularly Italy, Spain and Switzerland) by showing information films at town halls throughout Britain. However they made a costly decision by not going into the new form of cheap holidays which combined the transport and accommodation arrangements into a single 'package'. The company went further into decline and were only rescued by a consortium buy-out, led by Midland Bank, on 26 May 1972 [link].
After restructuring the company and entering into the travellers' cheque business the company prospered again. In 1992, the company was sold to the German bank, West LB, and the charter airline, LTU Group, and ironically was bought by American Express in 1996.
In the United Kingdom, Thomas Cook conforms to the model of a 'vertically integrated travel company' operating an airline, a retail arm and also a tour operator. This tour operator division has previously been known as Thomas Cook Tour Operations but in early 2006 was restructured as the 'Holidays Division', incorporating the previously separate Thomas Cook Signature brand alongside the Thomas Cook, JMC and Sunset brands. The 'Specialist Products' division includes Uptrips (including the Club 18-30 brand), Style, Neilson Active Holidays and Sunworld Ireland.
External links
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