Thomas Cook collapses, leaving thousands of travelers stranded

[Rover]

https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/22/business/thomas-cook-collapse/index.html

Capping a painful year, 178-year-old British tour operator Thomas Cook collapsed Sunday night, stranding hundreds of thousands of travelers.

The company said in a statement that its board "concluded that it had no choice but to take steps to enter into compulsory liquidation with immediate effect."

"An application was made to the High Court for a compulsory liquidation of the Company before opening of business today and an order has been granted to appoint the Official Receiver as the liquidator of the Company," it said in the statement.

Peter Fankhauser, Thomas Cook's chief executive, apologized to customers, employees, suppliers and partners.

"This marks a deeply sad day for the company which pioneered package holidays and made travel possible for millions of people around the world," Fankhauser said.

 

[Rover]

The British government has a plan to bring home the 160,000 UK travelers possibly stranded by Thomas Cook's collapse. Thomas Cook on Friday confirmed to CNN that it currently has 600,000 customers on vacation, including those 160,000 from the United Kingdom.

 

[Bob Dylan]

Brexit and the Torries terrible governance come home to roost!( It can happen here too folks!)

 

[The Journalist]

Wonder what will happen to Condor.

 

[Mystic River Dragon]

How very, very sad--the end of an institution.

 

[Anderson]

I don't think this had much to do with policy "coming home to roost". Travel agencies in general have been in decline for a few decades (since at least the late 1990s) and package tours have also been in decline, and Thomas Cook was utterly unable/unwilling to adapt. Their financials have been touchy for the last decade or so. So if anything was to blame, it was bad management coming home to roost.

 

[Devil's Advocate]

I don't think this had much to do with policy "coming home to roost". Travel agencies in general have been in decline for a few decades (since at least the late 1990s) and package tours have also been in decline, and Thomas Cook was utterly unable/unwilling to adapt. Their financials have been touchy for the last decade or so. So if anything was to blame, it was bad management coming home to roost.

From my perspective you're both correct. Gross mismanagement and excessive debt was the chronic disease that could not cope with the acute impact of self-inflicted economic uncertainty and a plummeting domestic currency. Thomas Cook is large enough to create a domino effect that puts other companies and businesses at serious risk of insolvency. Not to mention the immense unplanned expense of repatriating a vast number of abandoned travelers at short notice.

Wonder what will happen to Condor.

Ich bin ein Lufthansa

 

[Dakota 400]

I am sad to learn of the demise of this venerable travel company. The Company was among the leaders in the travel industry in promoting travel. Just think of all of the people in the past that became encouraged to explore their world because of their advertising and services that they offered. Thomas Cook was a competitor to American Express years ago. (Example: an American could purchase Thomas Cook Traveler's Checks or American Express Traveler's Checks) American Express changed their business model; it's sad that Thomas Cook did not apparently.

 

[MARC Rider]

The New York Times article about this mentioned that part of their problem was that package tours are a dying business. I'm sort of surprised that this is the case, even with all of the internet travel resources. If you're going to a foreign country, especially where you don't speak the language, I would think that tourists would want a package tour of some sort to handle logistics/airport transfers/dealing with confusing and crowded tourist sites, guides, etc.

The article made a big deal about millenials who want to customize their travel experience, but I think most of the disposable income is in the hands of Baby Boomers, who might have wanted to have (and probably did have when they were younger) a customized travel experience, but are now older and might prefer to have stuff handled for them, at least in a strange and exotic country.

The article also pointed out that owning their own airline was also an albatross around their neck.

 

[Anderson]

The issue is that a lot of the destinations that were being covered by package tours in, say, the 1970s stopped being "exotic" and/or having language issues over the next 30 years while the relaxation of exchange controls and the like got rid of a number of the bureaucratic advantages that were attached to said tours. The rise of a bunch of cruise lines didn't help, either.

I think the problem is that a good deal of the "traditional" package tour crowd has been pulled into either cruise trips (where you don't even have to change hotels for most of the trip but otherwise get the multiple-destinations-in-one-trip aspect, and where as often as not the cruise company likely at least offers a portal to deal with connecting flights and the like) or can fairly easily handle the booking on their own (in the case of a now-mundane single-destination trip) and probably gains a lot more flexibility in handling things on their own (since when booking on your own, you can directly size a trip to a given destination not only to your budget but also to your leave schedule).

The tour market has also segmented dramatically. It seems that most upper-tier colleges and universities are now running their own tour offices...but for someone like Thomas Cook, that destroys the value of their brand since now the traveler is booking with someone else (who is, in turn, picking who to go with for arranging the trip). It also disrupts the mass produced/copy and paste tour model.

 

[Devil's Advocate]

I find it curious that you continue to gloss over the financial effects of an extended 20% currency devaluation for a company operating on thin margins that is paid in pounds but must pay expenses in foreign currencies against a backdrop of extreme political turmoil and rapid erosion of consumer confidence. Thomas Cook was already due for a major restructuring but would have likely survived in some form (probably as an online booking service minus the high street shops and aircraft) if they didn't have to battle this much adversity at one time. Telling us that modern travelers no longer cared to do things the Thomas Cook way flies in the face of the largest postwar repatriation effort required to bring everyone home. Consumers still wanted to travel with Thomas Cook, but future bookings began to fall as travelers decided to wait and see how much damage a hard Brexit would cause. If the British government wasn't preoccupied with fighting itself it might have offered a transitional credit lifeline for restructuring instead of forced liquidation.

 

[Anderson]

If the currency devaluation had been to blame then the collapse should have happened about a year ago. The GBP/EUR pair has been reasonably stable since late 2016. Moreover, for a company potentially so exposed to such swings in currency values, they should have been hedging accordingly (since there were two major swings in the Pound in the year before the referendum and several similar swings in the previous decade).

The fact that the company was generating a decent amount of traffic clearly doesn't line up with the fact that they couldn't make money doing so: If you look at their financials on either Yahoo Finance or Morningstar, their margins were painfully thin even in the best of times. They posted a profit about half of the time (five of the last ten years per Morningstar), but while there was no year in which profits exceeded £25m (in 2015 they posted a profit of £23m, which was their best for the period) in several years losses exceeded £500m (2011 and 2012) and in all five loss-making full years the losses exceeded £100m (or, in other words, any one of the five loss-making years exceeded the collective profits of the five profitable years by a very wide margin).

To put it bluntly, the company did not have a sustainable model and had not had one for some time. It was limping its way to profits in good years and posting "one off" excuses in most of the rest. If nothing else, they were unable to command the premium their model needed to finance its significant retail presence (versus an Expedia or Priceline model).

The best the company could have hoped for was to become, more or less, "another Priceline" focusing on package tours...but I'm not sure whether that transition was survivable as an independent company or if, at that point, they would simply have done well to be absorbed by someone else.

A final point: I do wonder how many people who are being repatriated were on "full package" tours versus having just booked tickets, etc.

 

[Asher]

The New York Times article about this mentioned that part of their problem was that package tours are a dying business. I'm sort of surprised that this is the case, even with all of the internet travel resources. If you're going to a foreign country, especially where you don't speak the language, I would think that tourists would want a package tour of some sort to handle logistics/airport transfers/dealing with confusing and crowded tourist sites, guides, etc.

The article made a big deal about millenials who want to customize their travel experience, but I think most of the disposable income is in the hands of Baby Boomers, who might have wanted to have (and probably did have when they were younger) a customized travel experience, but are now older and might prefer to have stuff handled for them, at least in a strange and exotic country.

The article also pointed out that owning their own airline was also an albatross around their neck.

Maintaining an airline, like Amtrak trying to maintain their aging fleet is a never ending burden. I think the Internet allows everyone to plan and arrange a trip, make there own preferences, book a guide and in general do away with the old fuddy duddy way of follow the leader travel. The shuffling of funds caught up to them

 

[Devil's Advocate]

If the currency devaluation had been to blame then the collapse should have happened about a year ago. The GBP/EUR pair has been reasonably stable since late 2016. Moreover, for a company potentially so exposed to such swings in currency values, they should have been hedging accordingly (since there were two major swings in the Pound in the year before the referendum and several similar swings in the previous decade).

Conventional hedging is able to soften a steep drop but is unlikely to cover an extended fall completely. If the primary holding fails to recover before the hedge is exhausted you'll eventually end up back where you started again.

The best the company could have hoped for was to become, more or less, "another Priceline" focusing on package tours...but I'm not sure whether that transition was survivable as an independent company or if, at that point, they would simply have done well to be absorbed by someone else.

If they played their cards right Thomas Cook might have become an amalgam of Booking + Hotels + Charter. Sell the high street locations for debt relief, sell the airline on condition of favorable wetlease, keep the hotels and resorts. This would probably be a best case scenario and it would have required predictable market conditions to secure useful bids and credit lines. Unfortunately with recessionary warnings and a hard Brexit on the way no suitors or creditors were interested in going down this path.

 

[Anderson]

I think the broader issue was that they really weren't even moving in this direction and blew their shot with the last round of debt relief (they already "got out of jail free" once). Closing 21 of their 500+ locations after they blew up their debt load the second time was way too little too late. I'd note in particular that they were able to initially line up a rescue, but the cost demands kept rising.

To be fair, I think there may be a bigger issue with the UK's bankruptcy system vs the US system (my read is that there's a decent chance that in the US, they would have probably been able to file for Chapter 11 instead of Chapter 7, which would have let them keep operating as a "going concern"). This was probably a particular problem since as soon as it became probable that they were in trouble, they likely hit a "death spiral" very quickly.

 

[Dakota 400]

The article also pointed out that owning their own airline was also an albatross around their neck.

I am going to post on an issue of which I have miniscule knowledge; more of an opinion.

Thomsom Cruises/Holidays are a U.K. firm. They operated a fleet of charter aircraft to get their customers to their ships. Not knowing the details, Thomson Cruises became Marella Cruises but I think it was due to a change in the business model. Maybe their airline contributed to this change?

 

[Rover]

The New York Times article about this mentioned that part of their problem was that package tours are a dying business. I'm sort of surprised that this is the case, even with all of the internet travel resources. If you're going to a foreign country, especially where you don't speak the language, I would think that tourists would want a package tour of some sort to handle logistics/airport transfers/dealing with confusing and crowded tourist sites, guides, etc.

The article made a big deal about millenials who want to customize their travel experience, but I think most of the disposable income is in the hands of Baby Boomers, who might have wanted to have (and probably did have when they were younger) a customized travel experience, but are now older and might prefer to have stuff handled for them, at least in a strange and exotic country.

The article also pointed out that owning their own airline was also an albatross around their neck.

Many holiday travelers in the EU are unsophisticated and prefer a package tour, to let someone else work out all the details, so they can just grab the family and go. Most US unsophisticated travelers might just get in their car and drive to the nearest beach. Most EU holiday travelers are going to be going out of their country. The EU worker gets more vacation time than the same worker in the US. You can spend all year to plan your one US vacation. Maybe the EU workers take two vacations a year. I'm just generalizing, because I don't know. If you've been happy with a package tour operator, you're likely to use them again. Maybe many of your acquaintances do too.

 

[The Journalist]

Ich bin ein Lufthansa

Makes sense. What goes around comes around?

It seems like the two main things that did TC in were:
1) A truly nuts number of largely unproductive storefronts (how much rent was this company paying for all that prime retail space?), and doubling down on the in-person business model when package tours, a shrinking but still reasonably common market, work as an Internet product-something they barely did at all somehow.
2) Having to use a relatively weak currency to buy services in places that used other ones, months after they collected their own fares which meant they'd been fulfilling their obligations to passengers at a loss.

With a side of
3) Running an airline that flies to a whole bunch of destinations 3 times a week or less turned out to be less efficient as just bulk-buying seats on someone else's planes, and they didn't have the expertise of airline operations needed to make it work.

 

[MARC Rider]

. I think the Internet allows everyone to plan and arrange a trip, make there own preferences, book a guide and in general do away with the old fuddy duddy way of follow the leader travel. The shuffling of funds caught up to them

Yeah, sure, the Internet lets you plan a trip, but it's a good bit pf work, and if you're not careful, you can get burned with substandard lodging or a hotel in a sketchy neighborhood or something. A couple of years ago, we did a 6-night road trip loop from the Bay area to Northern California. That means I had to find motels in six towns, comparing at least 3 or 4 motels in each town to select the optimal one. Then there was booking the rental and flight. And finding eats wasn't a problem because we're native speakers of English and Americans, besides, so we can ask at the motel for recommendations and we have the cultural knowledge to know what to expect. We didn't need a tour guide because, again, we speak English like natives, and we can read all of the park brochures.

On the other hand, I'm idly thinking about a trip to Peru. Nothing fancy, just see Lima, Cusco, and take the train to Machu Picchu. My Spanish is limited to reading the bilingual notices posted on the Washington DC Metrobuses (but no bilingual signs in the Metro, for some reason.) The culture is different. I may not pick up on the cues that, say, a neighborhood is sketchy or that I'm doing something culturally offensive. Having a guide might actually make the trip a bit more relaxing to me, especially as I'm getting older and becoming a little less tolerant of traveling in the rough. The packager, through bulk buying may also allow one to stay in better accommodations than an individual traveler can find on their own, as well as discounted airfares, excursions, etc.

Also, there are "self guided" tour packages, where the package might be a hotel, rental car and airfare. My wife and I used one of them when we went to Israel in 1989. I considered using one when I went to London in 1985, but decided against it, as I was staying for a longer period, meeting my brother who was coming home from a semester abroad in Nepal. But if I had, I would have been able to stay at a better class of hotel at he same price I paid for the dump, er, place with a shared bath that I found on my own. (No internet then, you just showed up at the Tourist Information Center at Victoria Station and told them what price range and neighborhood you wanted, and they booked you at the next available place on the list.)

Anyway, I think there's a place for travel packagers even with the internet. But, as has been stated previously, Thomas Cook's problem wasn't that they offered package tours, it was that they hadn't really gone online, and had a lot of unnecessary expenses (High Street storefronts, an underutilized airline, etc.) and I guess the political uncertainty with Brexit and the currency fluctuations didn't help, either.

 

[Anderson]

Many holiday travelers in the EU are unsophisticated and prefer a package tour, to let someone else work out all the details, so they can just grab the family and go. Most US unsophisticated travelers might just get in their car and drive to the nearest beach. Most EU holiday travelers are going to be going out of their country. The EU worker gets more vacation time than the same worker in the US. You can spend all year to plan your one US vacation. Maybe the EU workers take two vacations a year. I'm just generalizing, because I don't know. If you've been happy with a package tour operator, you're likely to use them again. Maybe many of your acquaintances do too.

Agreed, though there seems to have been a limited connection in recent years for wanting to use one's parents' preferred tour operator. I know a number of tour companies have taken to having less rigidly-set itineraries. Also, I suspect that going relatively "normal" places like the Balearic Islands or southern Spain runs less of a risk of the usual sorts of hazards. And of course, there's the fact that the various LCCs dented the older markets for everyone (be it the Legacy carriers or package operators) since folks might think twice if they see a stupidly low "headline price" for airfare and just want to book the "in the foreign country" portion of the package with them.

Makes sense. What goes around comes around?

It seems like the two main things that did TC in were:
1) A truly nuts number of largely unproductive storefronts (how much rent was this company paying for all that prime retail space?), and doubling down on the in-person business model when package tours, a shrinking but still reasonably common market, work as an Internet product-something they barely did at all somehow.
2) Having to use a relatively weak currency to buy services in places that used other ones, months after they collected their own fares which meant they'd been fulfilling their obligations to passengers at a loss.

With a side of
3) Running an airline that flies to a whole bunch of destinations 3 times a week or less turned out to be less efficient as just bulk-buying seats on someone else's planes, and they didn't have the expertise of airline operations needed to make it work.

(1) was probably the worst of it, and also the least excusable in some respects given how long that trend had been underway, not to mention that internet-ish transitions are relatively easy to do these days.

(3) is a really curious mess, but IIRC they also didn't really bother to market their flights or hammer out any sort of partnerships outside of their operations. I don't know if I ever came across a Thomas Cook listing in my various ITA Matrix searches, for example (not that their flights seem to be anything to write home about...).

 

[Deni]

Also, there are "self guided" tour packages, where the package might be a hotel, rental car and airfare. My wife and I used one of them when we went to Israel in 1989. I considered using one when I went to London in 1985, but decided against it, as I was staying for a longer period, meeting my brother who was coming home from a semester abroad in Nepal. But if I had, I would have been able to stay at a better class of hotel at he same price I paid for the dump, er, place with a shared bath that I found on my own. (No internet then, you just showed up at the Tourist Information Center at Victoria Station and told them what price range and neighborhood you wanted, and they booked you at the next available place on the list.)

Anyway, I think there's a place for travel packagers even with the internet. But, as has been stated previously, Thomas Cook's problem wasn't that they offered package tours, it was that they hadn't really gone online, and had a lot of unnecessary expenses (High Street storefronts, an underutilized airline, etc.) and I guess the political uncertainty with Brexit and the currency fluctuations didn't help, either.

I think you're right that there is still a place for "self guided" or other kinds of packages even with the internet. All the info is at your fingertips but it can be overwhelming and time consuming. It's a question of what the model will look like. I started a travel planning business out of my home a few years ago and have several clients a year. My model is figuring out what kind of trip people want to take and where, and general budget, then come up with an itinerary. I work for a flat fee that I come up with based on how much work will be involved, so no commissions. (My selling point is that nothing I book for someone will be based on how much more money I'll make off of it) I do all the booking and make all the arrangements, including booking all the hotels, flights, airport transfers (or directions for taking metro/trains from airport if it's travelers who will do that), and any tours they may want to book.

Mine is kind of like having your really experienced friend plan your trip for you. And most of what I do is giving people the experience of independent travel but with the ease of buying a package. I don't know if my model will be one that becomes more widespread but the clients I've worked with have really liked it.

 

[jis]

Apparently, even though Thomas Cook's German subsidiary - Thomas Cook Gmbh, has filed for bankruptcy protection in Germany, they intend to continue operations. They are separate from the mother company, and probably will not be eventually affected by the liquidation of the British company.

 

[The Journalist]

(3) is a really curious mess, but IIRC they also didn't really bother to market their flights or hammer out any sort of partnerships outside of their operations. I don't know if I ever came across a Thomas Cook listing in my various ITA Matrix searches, for example (not that their flights seem to be anything to write home about...).

Interestingly, the reason I even know what Thomas Cook is was that they were going to fly nonstops London-Reno a few years ago. Bureaucratic hassles (we don't have enough Customs presence to process an A330's worth of passengers in a reasonable amount of time, basically) ended up canning it before it started, but until recently I only knew them as "some small British airline" and had no idea how broad their business model was.

I was wondering about Condor because they were apparently a consistently profitable arm of the business, possibly because they got the benefits of passengers from the mothership while not being responsible for the excess overhead. They also made their own partnerships; Alaska handles domestic passengers from their Seattle and Portland to Frankfurt runs out here in the West, and those flights are often much less than flying international on a legacy out of here.

 

[jis]

Condor Flugdienst Gmbh (which we all know as Condor Airline) has secured a line of credit of Euro 380 Million to help with day to day operating cash flow, from the German Government, and continues to fly, notwithstanding the collapse of the mother ship, British Thomas Cook company.

https://onemileatatime.com/condor-airlines-future/

Apparently Condor was profitable and is expected to continue to operate fine.

 

[JRR]

I think the broader issue was that they really weren't even moving in this direction and blew their shot with the last round of debt relief (they already "got out of jail free" once). Closing 21 of their 500+ locations after they blew up their debt load the second time was way too little too late. I'd note in particular that they were able to initially line up a rescue, but the cost demands kept rising.

To be fair, I think there may be a bigger issue with the UK's bankruptcy system vs the US system (my read is that there's a decent chance that in the US, they would have probably been able to file for Chapter 11 instead of Chapter 7, which would have let them keep operating as a "going concern"). This was probably a particular problem since as soon as it became probable that they were in trouble, they likely hit a "death spiral" very quickly.

The British system is quite different from the US. Some years ago while discussing the US system with UK bankruptcy practitioners , I mentioned that the US system protects the debtor. They were astonished and exclaimed:”Why would you do that?”

I responded by reminding them that a lot of us were fleeing the British debtor prisons!

Watch for the examination of the Cook principals. They are serious exams under oath and it is not unusual for them to result in criminal charges.