Thomas Cook lived from 1841 until just last week
Hi again it’s Jeff—I guess I should mention that I’m referring to Thomas Cook, the British travel agency, not a person by that name. More on that in a minute. Welcome back to Plain English, this Thursday edition, already October. Today’s episode is number 195, so that means all your episode resources can be found at PlainEnglish.com/195. The grammar lesson today is about using “much less” in a sentence and the flash cards are about emergencies.
Coming up today: Thomas Cook was the world’s oldest travel agency, selling vacation packages and tours to Europeans traveling abroad. Its sudden collapse on September 23 left 150,000 people stranded on vacation. Sounds like a dream, right? More like a nightmare as everyone has to scramble to find their way back home—and some people told horror stories of being locked in their hotel rooms until they paid. The phrasal verb today is “come through” and JR has a song of the week.
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World’s oldest travel agency is out of business
The world’s oldest travel agency, Thomas Cook, as officially gone out of business.
The eponymous Thomas Cook was founded in 1841 in Market Harborough, a town in Central England. Its original purpose was to organize train holidays and travel for members of a temperance movement. Temperance—we don’t use that word anymore, but it refers to the movement to refrain from drinking alcohol. The local temperance movement, made up of teetotalers, people who don’t drink, took Thomas Cook day trips on British railways in the mid-1800s.
Now, almost two centuries later, Thomas Cook had grown into a global brand, serving 19 million travelers a year, most of them based in Europe, and had offices and shops in 16 countries. They sold package vacations. You could go into a Thomas Cook agency and book your entire vacation, including your flight, accommodations, and tours in your destination city. They had retail shops. So you could walk in the door, sit down with an agent, browse through brochures and a big book, and select a holiday. You’d pay them for everything, and Thomas Cook would handle all the logistics—in fact, they were so popular they flew their own planes—they had their own airline. The airline flew to 82 destinations in Africa, Asia, North America, and Europe. It was a one-stop-shop for your vacation. You don’t have to worry about connecting flights, museum tickets, shuttle buses, what time does everything happen, all that stuff. Even your meals are included. Your only job as a traveler? Write the check, pack your bags, and show up at the appointed hour. Everything else was done for you.
That’s now how I travel. That’s not the way I like to do it; for me, half the fun is in figuring out what I’m going to do, when, what big attractions I’ll skip and what tiny attractions I’ll do instead. I like to wander the streets and duck into a restaurant if the food looks good. And I like to travel by myself or with one or two other people max—the idea of boarding a big shuttle bus with 50 other American travelers…I can’t even. However, there is some beauty in the simplicity of a package vacation. If you’re not good at planning, or if you have a large family, just let Thomas Cook handle everything for you. “Don’t just book it,” went the slogan, “Thomas Cook it.”
In Monday’s episode, we’ll talk about whether the idea of a full-service travel agency is even a viable business any longer. But today, I want to talk more about Thomas Cook itself, and what’s happening with all its travelers.
It’s a fiasco. Travelers paid Thomas Cook for everything, so Thomas Cook is the one that was supposed to pay the hotels they were staying in. Now Thomas Cook is no longer—and the hotels are expecting the travelers to pay directly for rooms they thought they had already paid for. In Tunisia, a hotel called Les Orange, is not allowing travelers to leave until they’ve paid a second time for their rooms. Security guards are blocking the hotel’s exits and not letting travelers leave until they pay. One couple said they had to pay 4,000 British pounds, almost $5,000, before they’d be allowed to leave. Britain has a government-manded travel insurance plan that will cover travelers’ hotel costs—but in the confusion, not everyone is getting prompt payment and not all hotel operators believe that insurance companies will come through.
Not everyone is facing such dire circumstances, but over 150,000 British citizens are stranded abroad, and the UK government is now trying to bring them home. The government is calling it the largest-ever peacetime repatriation effort; that label sounds a bit melodramatic to me, but it is quite an effort. Remember that Thomas Cook had its own airline, with its own planes and staff—those can no longer fly. So the British government had to obtain a fleet of aircraft to fly all over the world to collect the stranded Thomas Cook passengers and bring them home. They’re trying to arrange these flights as close as possible to the originally-scheduled dates and are encouraging people not to cut their vacations short. A spokesman says they have launched what is effectively now one of the UK’s largest airlines just to bring these passengers home. They’re flying 15 planes of travelers from Greece alone. Germany is facing twice as many stranded travelers as Britain is.
Employees were also hit hard. Twenty-one thousand people, including 9,000 in the UK, were suddenly without a job. The collapse of the company, though predictable, was swift. They were seeking emergency financing from investors, which was not forthcoming. As a last-ditch effort, they asked for a bailout from the British government, which also said no. Then, without warning, the company shut down. The web page was disabled. Twitter accounts were closed. The stock stopped trading. Employees were laid off and a 178-year-old company was no more. Just like that.
There’s one unfortunate irony in all this. A man by the name of Thomas Cook—no relation—was stranded in Greece by the travel agency Thomas Cook. When he booked his travel, the company promised him a “special surprise” on his vacation, since he has the same name as the agency. They sure delivered on that promise, though not in the way anyone expected!
By the way, as I was researching this article, I saw a different article about Japan Airlines. They have a new feature on their seatmap, you know, where you can select your seat? They now show—and this is not even a joke—they now show where the babies are going to be located on the plane! This is one of those ideas that makes so much sense, but will probably not last because surely it’ll cause offensive to somebody in the future. Enjoy it while it lasts: if you’re flying Japan Airlines, you can choose a seat as far away from the nearest baby as possible!
Time to say hi to a few listeners. I heard from Sefa from Istanbul, Turkey. Sefa said my pronunciation is perfect. Why thank you, Sefa, I’ve been practicing for a long time! Sefa has promised to spread the word among all his friends in Istanbul, which is amazing. We have a lot of listeners in Istanbul, and the more the merrier.
Amir from Argentina wrote to say his favorite episode so far is the one about millennials in the workplace. He said there were a lot of similarities between the American perspective, which I was describing, and his own experience. He agreed that having a sense of purpose at work improves everyone’s results.
Related: Episode 142: How millennials are changing the modern workplace
Thanks to Amir and Sefa for saying hi on WhatsApp. If you’d like to connect on WhatsApp, it’s real easy. From your phone, visit PlainEnglish.com/Whatsapp and it will open a new message to me.
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