The failure of Thomas Cook — Too much debt, not enough innovation
Business plans are useful for creating a roadmap of where you want to go in the future. However it is a static image capture of both your current point in time combined with capturing where you want to be in the future, and some vague details about “how” you will get there. In Thomas Cook’s case, they persisted with the model of owning the entire value chain — from flights, to hotels, and everything in between for their customers. Sadly, owning these facets brought no added value to them and crucially their customers.
Exploring, and more importantly, innovating through your business model provides the answer to “how’ you will get to you destination, and subsequently how you will create, capture and deliver value for your clients and customers. Thomas Cook became the most analog of travel agencies in a now fully digital world. Bricks and mortars businesses such as Thomas Cook failed to evolve their value propositions towards evolving customer behaviours and priorities.
Those that prioritise customer experience, hyper-personalisation and true value-co creation, will win in the long term. Travamigos, a new group-travel app, is focusing on these key areas, which makes group-travel and expeditions cost-effective, more social and more personalised to keen travellers.
If you would like to find out more about the topic of Thomas Cook’s failure, and the new business model innovations that are happening with the travel industry, click on the link below to listen to the latest Growth-Hacking Podcast Episode on this topic, led by entrepreneur, educator and investor, Dr Xiao Ma.
