Thomas Cook was born in Melbourne, Derbyshire on the 22nd November 1808. When he was 14, he started working as an apprentice for his uncle in his cabinet making business. Aged 18 he became a Baptist missionary touring villages in the area and making a living from his skills as a cabinet maker. He married in 1833 and his son John Mason Cook was born on the 13th January 1834. 

He was a member of the Temperance Movement and used to attend large meetings in the Midlands, often travelling on foot. However, the Midlands Counties Railway had just opened and when a large crowd of people from Leicester wanted to attend a Temperance Meeting in Loughborough, he negotiated a special rate for the party of 500 people making the round trip. 

Thus was born, not just a famous business name, but the first mover (pardon the pun) in the travel industry, a business which has been preeminent in that sector from that day until – well Monday 23rd September 2019.

Thomas Cook & Son went from strength to strength opening offices in London in 1865. Cook diversified into travel accessories including the sale of guide books, binoculars and specialist footwear.

 He set up his own hotel with Temperance at its heart. Gradually more exotic destinations were advertised including trips around Europe and even to the Nile. Italy, in particular, became a favoured destination as it still is today. Mass tourism is even credited with stabilising the Italian economy when that fledgling country was going through turbulent times.

Tourism was alive and kicking and travel agents continued to thrive as more and more people could afford to visit foreign climes and experience a world very different from their own. This accelerated post-WWII and was again boosted with the growth of air travel.

Thomas Cook continued to thrive despite mounting competition but businesses never stay stable for ever. Gradually market conditions changed but Thomas Cook worked very hard to stay in the game. Their fight continued until the weekend when the group collapsed with debts of at least £1.7 billion. 

That is one considerable amount of money to have accumulated in debt.

So what went wrong? Market conditions did change with the growth of low cost airlines and booking online. This was not like the change that killed off Kodak when the move from film to digital was very rapid. Changing ways of booking travel was rapid but the effect was masked by rising numbers of people on the move.

Yet gradually and imperceptibly, life for the large generalist travel agent was becoming more and more difficult. Perhaps it was Brexit with the fall of Sterling that was the final nail in the coffin. Buying everything overseas with a currency devalued by 20% cannot have helped. 

In the end it was the lack of a measly £200 million that brought them down.

There was another lesson too – the power of brand. So trusted was the Thomas Cook brand that people were booking holidays right up until the collapse. For many businesses, talk of financial instability would have spelt ruin.  But people trusted the name for many years when suspicion of its eventual demise was ever present.

So for you and me running our businesses, mine the business of law, what are the lessons? 

No business should expect the market to stay the same. Innovation is the order of the day and consumers born in the digital age expect services to be delivered rather differently from the past.

We will not get away with inertia for long.

Secondly, debt is useful but there are costs attached and borrowing more without a robust repayment strategy is the road to ruin. 

We have some interesting plans for the future and I am confident that our business plan is robust and will put us ahead of our competition; but constant re-evaluation of what we are doing is always wise.