I'm not surprised Thomas Cook have gone under

[Burningcheeks]

Their service was shambolic. I actually got up & walked out mid-booking because they gave me no confidence at all. The staff didn't know their arse from their elbow. I was trying to book one of their packages to the Monaco Grand Prix & it was costing thousands. They were making a complete balls of it. If that was happening on the shop floor I wonder what else was happening higher up? I feel very sorry for all those let down & the enormous number of ensuing job losses.

Brexit will kill any company already struggling. They may have had a bit more time to restructure sort things out but the terrible exchange rate kills companies who are so exposed to foreign countries.

Lots of people haven’t gone away or shortened holidays because they can’t afford spending money in foreign currencies. If the hotel shoots up 20% in cost, it’s very hard for TC to pass that on as the competition with AirbnbB etc is too strong.

@Elderflower14 what were they supposed to say on Twitter?? ‘Sorry everyone we think we are about to go under but it’s not confirmed yet’. I can imagine the last minute negotiations were happening until very late last night. Everyone was probably living in hope of some miraculous rescue.

Chatterbox

Brexit didn’t have as much to do with it as you might think. TC very nearly failed several years ago. Emergency funding was pumped in by the Banks following pressure from the Bank of England.

It is convenient to point at Brexit but in the past TC have also pointed at
Icelandic Volcanos
Tunisian Terrorists
ISIS and problems in Egypt and Turkey
Summer heatwave

People would have loved to see them turned around but they had far too much debt.

Well, these people who are losing their jobs deserve it I suppose, for being so crap, eh OP? Brought it all on themselves?

What a fucking appalling attitude.

People criticising poor service etc...imagine how hard it will have been for the staff to keep up morale knowing the company was failing and strong likelyhood of losing their jobs!! Imagine the toxic atmosphere behind the scenes and pressure from the top ....be kind people!!

Are all the staff going to lose their jobs? My niece is cabin crew?

Thomas cook airlines is no longer operational, so yes the airline staff have no jobs this morning

Interesting comment about twitter - my son has links to aviation industry and was sent a copy of a tweet at 10pm, posted by an aviation insider, stating that the company and flights would cease at 3am and replacement planes and crew were already mobilised on TC flight schedules. Guess they can’t go public until all planes back on uk soil but even so.....

I booked a package this summer, not with TC but my reasoning was I didn’t have time or inclination to research or look through Booking.com etc and just wanted to press a button online and have it all
Booked. Was only a week, etc.
Prob won’t do it again now as hadn’t for about 15 years, they have their place.
Sympathies to all who have lost their jobs and who have lost out on holidays.
My first hol w DH was TC, it is sad.

but I am amazed that people still use travel agents at all

I’m not

It's so easy to do everything online now. Flights, hotels, get all the information about tours, restaurants etc from wikitravel etc and you've probably saved about a quarter of the total compared to going to a travel agent at least.

Not necessarily. I have booked holidays independently, and through tour operators.
I find faffing around trying to match flights and accommodation a PITA. Some holidays I have booked were cheaper as a package, especially if the cost of taxi transfers needs to be factored in. Also, having the safety net of a tour operator is very important to a lot of people.

I was thankful that our trip to Madeira with Tui earlier on this year was not with el cheapo airline. When our return flight was delayed by over 12 hours Tui paid for us all to stay in a hotel. I can’t see Ryanair doing the same.

Tour operators like Tui and Jet2 have upped their game and it is a complete myth that all of their holidays are “Brits abroad”. We have stayed in some family owned upmarket hotels in resorts with very few Brits.

The thing is, many people are not too nervous to do things online, they just don’t want to do the organisation of booking a holiday all themselves

Exactly bumblingbovine49

I don't even know what a hotel rep is, but assuming some service you get with package holidays,

There is no need to be so disingenuous LiveInAHidingPlace . Sneering at people who prefer to book their holidays as a package is not a crime or only for socially inferior people . Stop being so smug and superior. I feel that there is a lot of snobbery about booking package holidays these days.

As I said before I am perfectly able to piece a holiday together, but sometimes I just don't have the time and patience to do it myself, and sometimes getting flights, transfers and accommodation through a tour operator that is covered by ABTA and ATOL is worth the piece of mind. Besides I won't fly Ryanair.

As others have said here ,the market for package holidays is changing.So many people booking online, and cutting out the middle man .Like other shops on the high street going bust ,as Internet is cheaper and easier.Feel sorry for those stranded ,and those out there on holidays too.Staff will also have to be flown home .Good old taxpayer footing the bill of course but unless we want holidays to increase in cost no choice really !

ChazsBrilliantAttitude

All the reasons you listed would have affected holiday companies across europe, inc the heatwave.

TC was doubtless a struggling company but in a more benign climate, they could have carried on trading.
Even if they went into administration, they could have been sold off, as it is now, they are insolvent, so will disappear.

OP YABU if you think a trip to the Grand Prix in Monaco is going to cost anything less than a few thousand!

Poorly run companies go under all the time, granted not of this size, but no I'm not surprised it has collpased.

It isn't as simple as blaming customer service though, however bad someone's experience is. Years of mismanagement, not keeping up with market trends, incidents that put their name in the headlines and the value of the pound amongst other things.

I am certain that there are things they could have done to stay afloat in some way had they not left it too late. If the shops weren't viable, scaling back or moving online only, perhaps reducing the number of locations they flew too or resorts in their portfolio or they could have found some niche selling point. I'm not saying it's as simple as those examples, but there are things that could have been done had management given it some foresight and a decent strategy. Travel is a competitive and fast moving market with no place for complacent management.

There is still a place for a tour operator like TC in the market. Whilst independent travel is gaining popularity not every traveller is confident or has the time or ability to book independently. There are benefits and there are plenty of customers who book with the likes of TC you only have to see how many have been left stranded or with ruined plans.

My view is it comes down to mismanagement, plain and simply.

"I find faffing around trying to match flights and accommodation a PITA."

You find booking a flight to and hotel in the same place a PITA?

"There is no need to be so disingenuous LiveInAHidingPlace . Sneering at people who prefer to book their holidays as a package is not a crime or only for socially inferior people hmm. Stop being so smug and superior. I feel that there is a lot of snobbery about booking package holidays these days."

I know mn's fav thing is to call people disingenuous when they don't know what something is, but I genuinely don't know what a hotel rep is. Shrug. No need to get a hump on, is there? Seems I touched a nerve with you for whatever reason.

jasjas
They couldn’t be sold off because the historic debt mountain. They had tried and failed to sell their airline earlier this year.
They had over £1bn of debt and had overpaid for MyTravel in 2007. They wrote off £1.1bn of value of MyTravel this year.

They had been limping along for the last 7 or 8 years.

Mismanagement over the last 20 years or so is primarily responsible. TC were very good for the standard business model of the second half of the 20th century but they took too long to change to the way things started going at the end of the 1990s. That's down solely to mismanagement by the directors who took huge salaries and bonuses. It would have gone anyway but Brexit is probably the final 5% that pushed it over the cliff because of the exchange rate affecting fuel costs etc and a fall in the number of people travelling this year due to uncertainty.

Very sad to see such a household name go after so long and I feel dreadfully sorry for the "shop floor" staff who, as with so many other companies, take the financial hit for the incompetence of those round the board table who are fat cats lapping up the cream.

*"Even my parents, nearing their 70s, do everything online now.

.....awwwww, bless ‘em, we loves a feisty oldie."

That was hardly the spirit in which my comment was intended, but if you choose to take it that way, fair enough.*

There's only one way to take a comment like that. Even people not yet in their 70s, ie still in their 60s, do everything online? Why does it surprise you that anyone might be amused or ( in my case) insulted by that comment LiveInAHidingPlace?

@jasjas1973

All true that if this was a more benign climate etc, TC may have survived..

..however we've known for three years that Brexit is happening and will affect consumer confidence - this is factual.

@ChazsBrilliantAttitude is spot on that TC's acquisition of MyTravel in 2007 piled a heap of debt onto the company. This is standard practice of unimaginative management who want to swell the size of the company to make it more attractive/show shareholders they're diversifying etc.

What it did do as @ChazsBrilliantAttitude said earlier is make the company so inflexible and saddled with debt that it couldn't react to gusts of wind or change

That's not atypical, so many firms do mergers and acquisition, then struggle to integrate the business, service the debt, and then worse, they forget about streamlining and sorting their own core offering, the thing that allows them to have their name trading above the door

I didn’t rate them the couple of times we went. W also nipped into a shop just to see what they could offer and she was using jet2. We did it ourselves for about £500 cheaper using jet2 ourselves. I feel for the staff x

Sneering at people who prefer to book their holidays as a package is not a crime or only for socially inferior people

Amen to that. We have a package booked through Trailfinders and believe me it took a shitload of research by us before we booked. We gave Trailfinders the list of airlines and accommodation we had researched, costed and desired and asked them to put together a package which they did. It still took a few tweaks to get it right. Last week we decided to extend our holiday and they did it with no fuss and thankfully no airline charges. Mainly done in store and over the phone. Shocking huh?

So thousands of people are stranded abroad and thousands of people are losing their job, but you want to make it all about your 20 minute anecdote?

The travel agent side of things was always on borrowed time. It managed to see off the other national chains, such as Lunn Poly, AT Mays, Going Places, Co-Op etc and managed to be "last man standing" on the High Street. But it was always an unsustainable business model when most people just book their own online. There were fewer and fewer people who needed someone else to do it for them. Like most High Street national chains, (inc retail and restaurants), they used a lot of cheap/young/inexperienced staff so the customer service was also often poor, which again drove customers away.

We stopped using the High Street travel agents about 20 years ago after a succession of poor booking experiences, the worst of which was Going Places where some spotty kid took nearly 3 hours to book a simple sunny med holiday straight out of the brochure, (I think it was literally his first time using the computer as he hadn't a clue), and then phoned back a couple of days later full of apologies that he'd made a mistake and not actually confirmed the booking and that it was no longer available and could we come in again to look for something else - err- no - not a chance.

We started booking direct by phone about 20 years ago and have been booking online for the last 15.

The future of physical bricks n mortar travel agents is niche/boutique firms offering a personal service for those wanting something unusual who are willing to pay for it.

As for the hotel/flights side of things, I havn't booked either a hotel or flight with Thomas Cook for very many years. They don't do anything I want at a sensible price. They seem tied to an outdated model where they have completed ignored or not noticed the modern trend to "build your own" holiday. The last flight was about 10 years ago to Florida and it was nothing special - cramped seats, poor food, onboard entertainment screen didn't work, unfriendly staff - no better than budget airlines, so that experience put me off using them for European holidays (not that I would anyway because they were always a lot more expensive).

You have to be a really self-centred arsehole to conclude that a company went bust because you received poor service from them once.

"There's only one way to take a comment like that. Even people not yet in their 70s, ie still in their 60s, do everything online? Why does it surprise you that anyone might be amused or ( in my case) insulted by that comment LiveInAHidingPlace?"

Sorry but you only have to look at the rates of internet usage to know that most older people do not book everything online.

"Sneering at people who prefer to book their holidays as a package is not a crime or only for socially inferior people"

Jesus, you extrapolate a lot, don't you?

And it doesn't surprise me people would be offended, since people are offended by someone saying they blew their nose earlier since it's offensive to people without noses or some shit.

There is still a place for a tour operator like TC in the market. Whilst independent travel is gaining popularity not every traveller is confident or has the time or ability to book independently.

Such a shame that TC, Lunn Poly, AT Mays, Going Places all took over the High Street and caused the demise of hundreds of small independent travel agents. What goes around comes around. Did the national chain travel agent staff feel sorry for the independent shops they caused to shut?? Luckily, there are still a few independent travel agents around for those who need something special or for those who can't do it themselves online.

A bit like national high street chains dominating retail and restaurants - they push out the independents and then eventually collapse themselves, leaving everyone worse off.

Did someone leave the gate open at the Cuntfarm this morning?