Thomas Cook Airlines

» see thomascookairlines.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Antalya knew this airline better than most of Britain did. Every summer it put British package tourists onto the Turkish coast in numbers whole hotels were built around, and when it stopped, 21,033 of its customers were sitting in Turkish resorts holding return tickets that no longer existed. The Turkish government had to instruct hotels not to evict anybody. That is the Thomas Cook Airlines I actually saw from here: an arrival, and then an absence.

The airline was much younger than the name painted on it. JMC Air Ltd was assembled on 1 September 1999 out of Flying Colours Airlines and Caledonian Airways, carrying the initials of John Mason Cook, and it flew under that forgettable badge until April 2003, when somebody had the sense to put the 158-year-old travel company on the tail instead. What it did was unglamorous and enormous. It was a charter operation, the flying half of a package holiday, and in 2018 it carried 8,092,208 passengers on 39,512 flights with a fleet that ended at thirty five aircraft.

None of that was the problem. The airline was the healthier organ in a group carrying about £1.7 billion of debt and a high-street chain of shops nobody walked into anymore. Talks for a rescue ran through the weekend of 21 September 2019 and needed a last £200 million that nobody would put up. The group went into compulsory liquidation in the small hours of Monday morning, and because a liquidated company cannot hold an air operator's certificate, the airline died in the same sentence as the shops.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the night it stopped ~

The last commercial service was MT2643, an Airbus A330 from Orlando to Manchester, which was in the air while the liquidation was being agreed and landed into a company that no longer existed. Crews found out the way everybody else did. Aircraft were seized at gates, and 9,000 of the group's UK staff and another 12,000 abroad were out of work before the morning news finished.

The certificate itself was not formally revoked until 7 November 2019, six weeks after the last wheels came up. Airlines tend to have two death dates like this, the day they stop flying and the day the regulator files the paperwork, and only the first one is remembered by anybody who was on a plane.

~ operation matterhorn ~

Britain had roughly 150,000 of its own citizens abroad on Thomas Cook holidays that morning, and no airline to bring them back. The Civil Aviation Authority had rehearsed this after Monarch went down in 2017, but at nowhere near this size. It chartered a substitute fleet from whoever had spare aircraft and ran it for two weeks under the name Operation Matterhorn. About 140,000 people came home at a cost north of £100 million, and the final flight landed at Manchester on 6 October.

The bill did not stay in Britain. Turkey's tourism council put what the group owed the Turkish sector at $381 million, and the hoteliers' federation warned of 600,000 to 700,000 fewer visitors a year. Ankara set aside €50 million in cheap loans for the small businesses that had been working almost entirely for one British tour operator. Spain and Tunisia got versions of the same letter.

~ what the name did next ~

Fosun, the Chinese group that had been Thomas Cook's largest shareholder and its failed rescuer, bought the brand out of the liquidation and relaunched it in 2020 as an online travel agency. Type thomascook.com today and you will get a working holiday site. It sells flights on other people's aircraft.

That is the ordinary ending for a travel brand and it is worth being precise about what survived: the trademark did, and the airline did not. A 178-year-old name is an asset that can be sold at a creditors' meeting. Thirty five aircraft and 21,000 jobs are not.

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