What Thomas Cook’s collapse tells us about modern tourism
When I arrived in Vietnam on my first big solo trip overseas, I was equipped with a 55 litre backpack, a copy of the Lonely Planet and some travellers checks.
There were no smartphones nor free roaming. I’d booked my flight online using a student-oriented travel agent and relied on a hostel website to tell me where to stay. Upon arriving in a new city, my friends and I prayed that the map in the guide book was still in date. At one point a lady walked off down a dark alleyway with our passports. Thankfully, she came back within 24 hours with our Laos visas.
This was my first experience of backpacking and shoestring travel.
Now with the proliferation of travel app-based businesses, my early experiences seem unimaginable in so many ways. How did I know where to go? How did I stay in touch with friends and family back home? How did I meet up with people? The answers to these questions were usually intuition, rarely, and with planning and/or pure luck.
Thomas Cook was founded in 1841, and is considered to be the world’s oldest travel agency. It started by providing one-day rail excursion from Leicester to Loughborough. Later it took advantage of growing British interest in continental travel, spurred on by the development of the railways and gradually grew into a company…
