Inside the Thomas Cook collapse chaos that stranded 150,000 Brits abroad five years on

Thomas Cook went bust five years ago today, with around 150,000 people stranded abroad as the Civil Aviation Authority and Department for Transport worked to get them home

Five years ago today tens of thousands of holidaymakers were stranded abroad as one of the world’s most recognisable travel firms dramatically folded.

In the early hours of Monday, September 23, the UK company that had revolutionised the package holiday quietly filed for compulsory liquidation. Last-ditch efforts that ran deep into the night to rescue the colossal firm had proved a failure, leaving a company that had been founded way back in 1841 by businessman and Baptist preacher Thomas Cook no more road to run on.

The UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) announced that the company had “ceased trading with immediate effect”. The group’s chief executive officer, Peter Fankhauser, described the death of Thomas Cook as a “matter of profound regret”. Understandable, given he had presided over a company which had outlived quite a few monarchs and survived two world wars. The world’s oldest travel firm was no more.

The company had turned-over £9.6 billion that year, serviced nearly 20 million travellers across 16 countries, and employed more than 21,000 people, 9,000 of whom in the UK. Thomas Cook almost seemed too big to fail.

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Before too much time could be spent working out why it did and mourning the loss of a British travel icon, the small matter of how to get the 150,000 Thomas Cook customers who were on holiday at the time home needed to be addressed. What followed was the world’s largest peacetime repatriation project.

Officials estimated it could take a fortnight to get all 150,000 travellers back to British soil from far-flung locations like the Caribbean, Turkey, and the USA. The Department of Transport had been preparing for such an event for a year, according to Civil Service World. Codenamed Operation Matterhorn, the CAA and DfT used 150 planes to run 746 flights over two weeks to get every single stranded person home and – in the process – form the fourth biggest airline in the UK.

During that fortnight stories of customers caught up in the chaos made for endless headlines. One woman lamented how she had forked out £2,000 for her first ever holiday, just before Thomas Cook went under. Another passenger, somewhat enjoyably named Thomas Cook, had his £10,000 Greek wedding ruined when the firm sank. Even Piers Morgan’s brother found himself stranded.

However, the real heartbreak was suffered by those who worked at the company. Solemn-faced workers emerged from the former travel giant’s headquarters carrying plastic boxes filled with their belongings after news broke that they had lost their jobs. They were seen weeping and hugging one another as the reality of the firm’s collapse hit home.

Their misery was spread across the UK, where Thomas Cook had operated in around 600 high street stores, as well as employing 1,000 employees at its Lynch Wood headquarters in Peterborough.

The question of why such an established company went under when it did would be picked over for some months.

At its core, the brand had struggled to keep up with the fast-paced, changing nature of the industry. A new generation of holidaymakers were more used to finding their own place to stay on Airbnb, buying plane tickets online and researching activities through Google. The utility of the internet had made their expertise of travel agents less valuable.

The environment Thomas Cook operated in “radically changed with the advent of budget air travel, online travel services and easy access to private accommodation through online platforms like Airbnb,” noted Professor John Lennon, director of the Moffat Centre for Travel and Tourism at Glasgow Caledonian University.

To make matters worse, a failed coup in Turkey in which tanks rolled onto city streets caused a marked downturn in interest for holidays to one of Thomas Cook’s biggest destinations. A heatwave in the UK two years later saw more Brits content to stay at home, while the impact of Brexit meant fewer people had cash to splash as the strength of the pound plummeted.

All of these factors made for a headwind that the company couldn’t continue struggling against. “It was insurmountable debt that sealed Thomas Cook’s fate in the end,” reports the International Banker.

“The company failed to clear a debt burden of £1.1 billion that had almost destroyed it back in 2011. Several ill-advised deals, especially its 2007 merger with MyTravel Group—a company that had achieved a profit only once in the previous six years—saddled the group with excessive debt.”

Despite many attempts to raise enough money to pay off the owed-cash, the cost of servicing the interest on the debts alone would prove crippling. Talks of rescue buy-outs came and went, until there was nowhere else for the company to go.

When it did go under, it dragged the hopes of many with it. Ruth Morse from Halesowen, West Midlands, had been due to marry her partner in Cyprus, and had booked the whole event through Thomas Cook, including the decorations, the cake, wedding venues and a private bar.

Of the 44 guests due to attend, about 25 booked their flights and accommodation through the travel agent. Ruth had been planning the wedding for two years and had organised it with money from her mother and her late brother Ben, who was murdered in 2017, the BBC reported.

“From the grief we had, we pulled ourselves together to arrange our dream day. We will rebook the wedding, but I won’t do it abroad again because I have lost faith. I feel completely devastated by all of this,” she said at the time.