The Rise and fall on Thomas Cook

We all here the world in the tourism,Thomas Cook centuary old tourism business company.It started by Thomas Cook (22 November 1808 – 18 July 1892) was an English businessman. He is best known for founding the travel agency Thomas Cook & Son.
Founder
- Thomas Cook was born on 22 November 1808, to John and Elizabeth Cook, who lived at 9 Quick Close in the village of Melbourne, Derbyshire
- At the age of 10, Cook started working as an assistant to a local market gardener for a wage of six pence a week.
- He was 14, he secured an apprenticeship with his uncle John Pegg, and spent five years as a cabinet maker.
- On 4 August 1845 he arranged for a party to travel from Leicester to Liverpool.
- In 1846, he took 350 people from Leicester on a tour of Scotland.
- In 1851 he arranged for 150,000 people to travel to the Great Exhibition in London.
- Four years later, he planned his first excursion abroad, when he took two groups on a ‘grand circular tour’ of Belgium, Germany and France, ending in Paris for the Exhibition.
Thomas Cook & Son
- Thomas Cook acquired business premises on Fleet Street, London in 1865.
- shop which sold essential travel accessories, including guide books, luggage, telescopes and footwear.
- In 1872, he formed a partnership with his son, John Mason Andrew Cook, and renamed the travel agency as Thomas Cook & Son.
- Their business model was refined by the introduction of the ‘hotel coupon’ in 1868.
- 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.
- 1865, the founder’s son John Mason Cook began working for the company full-time. In 1871,
- He became a partner, and the name of the company was changed to Thomas Cook & Son.
- The company was nationalised along with the railways in 1948, becoming part of the British Transport Commission. After de-nationalisation
- 1972, it was acquired by a consortium of Trust House Forte, Midland Bank and the Automobile Association and then bought by Westdeutsche Landesbank in 1992.
- Thomas Cook had acquired business premises on Fleet Street, London, in 1865.
- In 1866, the agency organised the first escorted tours of the United States.
- The first escorted round-the-world tour departed from London in September 1872.
- By 1888, the company had established offices around the world, including three in Australia and one in Auckland, New Zealand, and in 1890, the company sold over 3.25 million tickets.
- In September 1994, American Express (Amex) bought the corporate travel interests of Thomas Cook Travel Inc. which represented about ten percent of the British company’s total revenue.
Thomas Cook Group
- It was formed on 19 June 2007 by the merger of Thomas Cook AG (itself the successor to Thomas Cook & Son) and MyTravel Group.
- Thomas Cook was listed on both the London Stock Exchange and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.
- The Thomas Cook Group ceased trading on 23 September 2019 and entered administration.
- Around 9,000 UK staff and 21,000 worldwide were left without jobs and 600,000 customers left abroad, triggering the UK’s largest peacetime repatriation.
- The companies announced they expected to make savings of over £75 million a year, following the integration of both businesses. Under the terms of the merger, the owners of Thomas Cook AG, KarstadtQuelle.
- On 14 February 2008, Thomas Cook bought booking website Hotels4U.com for £21.8 million.
- On 8 March 2009, Thomas Cook signed a deal with Octopus Media Technology to host, upload, and provide an online video player for Thomas Cook TV.
- In July 2010, Thomas Cook Group bought German tourism company Öger Tours, which was owned by Vural Öger.
- In October 2006, two young British children, Christianne and Robert Shepherd aged seven and six years old respectively, died from carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a faulty boiler while on a holiday in Corfu booked through Thomas Cook. They were the first such deaths in the company’s history.Two Thomas Cook employees were subsequently amongst 11 defendants facing manslaughter by negligence charges at a criminal trial in Greece in 2010 – both were acquitted and the company was cleared of any wrongdoing.
- In March 2017, Thomas Cook announced the sale of its Belgian airline operations to Lufthansa. As a result, Thomas Cook Airlines Belgium was shut down by November 2017 with two aircraft and all traffic rights being handed to Brussels Airlines.
- The Financial Times newspaper said in February 2019 that the Thomas Cook Group had received bids for its airline business, which includes Condor, and also the company as a whole.
- In April 2019 the company hired the restructuring specialist Alix Partners to work on the company’s balance sheet and implement cost restructuring plans to help reduce its £1.6 billion debt.
- In May 2019 the company reported that it had secured £300 million of emergency funding from its banks.Then in May 2019, the company announced a loss of £1.5 billion for the first half of its financial year, with £1.1 billion of the loss being attributable to goodwill write-downs.
- In June 2019, Thomas Cook said that it was in talks with the Chinese company Fosun International with regard to the possible sale of its tour operator business.
- On 28 August 2019, Thomas Cook announced that Fosun would pay £450 million for 75% of the firm’s tour business and 25% of its airline.
- Thomas Cook Group from administration took place the evening of 22 September 2019.At around midnight on 23 September.