Thomas Cook travel agency (Photo: DrimaFilm / Shutterstock.com)
A few days ago an alarming message appeared on this blog about the decline of travel agencies in general and of Thomas Cook in particular. However, the influence that Thomas Cook (1808-1892) had on the development of tourism and the massification of this tourism should not be underestimated.
This Englishman had already been a carpenter, evangelist and book printer before he started to emerge as a tour organizer and leader in the 1855s. Tourism as such hardly existed and the first few years the start-up of his company was therefore accompanied by trial and error. In 1869, the year of the World Exhibition in Paris, he organized a first trip to the continent and in XNUMX a first organized trip to Egypt followed. Three years later, together with his son John Mason Cook, he successfully led a group of Britons on a round-the-world trip that included China and India.
Thomas Cook would never again see his company gain a foothold in Asia. Thomas Cook and Son opened its first branch in Singapore in 1903. It became the operational base for the conquest of Southeast Asia. Already a year later Bangkok included for the first time in Thomas Cook's travel offer, which immediately started providing trips to Indonesia and Indochina in the same year.
Thomas Cook
Cook & Son provided all-in travel to Siam, ranging from arranging the boat trip to transport by rail or road. They could count on their agents who had been active in Bangkok since 1907. After all, traveling was still an adventure in those days. Tourism was still in its infancy and it goes without saying that traveling in that period, especially to exotic destinations such as Siam, was only for the Happy few was reserved.
A good proof of the credibility the company had built up was that even before the outbreak of the First World War, Thomas Cook hotel vouchers - the forerunners of the Travelers Cheques - were accepted without hesitation in all -better- hotels. Of the Raffles in Singapore about it Hotel des Indes in Batavia until it Oriental Hotel in Bangkok. During the interwar period, Thomas Cook acquired a virtual monopoly in Asia thanks to its dominant position in the organized travel market. Thousands of Britons – who still have the core business of the company – combined a visit to Malaysia, Singapore or Burma with a trip to Siam. Thomas Cook was, to my knowledge, the first foreign company to offer a visit to the ruins of Ayutthaya in combination with an elephant ride from the early 1928s. In XNUMX, the company expanded considerably when it was taken over by the Belgian company, which focused on luxurious international train travel Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits which operated, among other things, the Orient Express. They would ensure that Thomas Cook could expand its activities from Bangkok to French Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos). However, the outbreak of the Second World War and the accompanying occupation of Singapore by the Japanese brought an abrupt end to the expansion of the company in the Far East.
Thomas Cook advertisement from 1927
From the late 1989s and early 20.000s, people had more free time and the travel market was opened up and globalized. Mass tourism was born and Thomas Cook would reap the benefits as one of the larger players. Thomas Cook opened an office in Bangkok in 1997 and worked intensively with the German Neckermann. This was not really surprising because the latter company had been dominant on the Asian market since the XNUMXs and by the end of the XNUMXs was already bringing an average of XNUMX - mainly German and Scandinavian - tourists to Thailand every year. It was also Neckermann that was the first European travel agency to launch charter flights to various popular holiday destinations. First to Pattaya and later to Phuket, Krabi and Khao Lak. With their relatively cheap charters, whether or not in combination with equally cheap hotel holidays, Cook and Neckermann would play a key role in opening up and massifying the tourist market in Thailand. In XNUMX, Condor (Lufthansa) and Neckermann formed C&N. This tour group bought Thomas Cook four years later. Within the portfolio, Thomas Cook AG continued to operate as an individual entity because of its strong, historical reputation.
However, the heyday of the company was a thing of the past. As a result of major restructuring in 2005, Thai-based Swiss Thomas Maurer bought all the shares linked to the Asian operations and restructured this part of the company into the still operational Travel Center Asia Ltd. The Thomas Cook Group is in fact only active under its own name or otherwise in Great Britain (My Travel), the Netherlands (Neckermann, Vrij Uit) and Belgium (Neckermann, Pegase).