> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://redinkblackink.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Thomas Cook: 178 Years, and the Warnings Were in the Accounts - URL: https://redinkblackink.com/doomed-thomas-cook-warning-signs/ - Published: 2026-11-01T22:21:04.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-01T22:45:04.000Z - Description: Thomas Cook's 2019 collapse felt sudden. The debt, the dividends and the shopfronts had been warning about it for a decade. - Author: H Prince - Tags: Doomed *Doomed, No. 1\. Businesses that never saw it coming, despite the signs.* --- On Monday 23 September 2019, the UK Civil Aviation Authority announced that Thomas Cook had "ceased trading with immediate effect". More than 150,000 British holidaymakers were abroad at the time. The government chartered 45 jets to fly 64 routes that first day, in what was codenamed Operation Matterhorn and became the biggest peacetime repatriation in British history. For a few days, the fleet made the government temporarily the country's fifth-largest airline. Around 22,000 jobs were at risk worldwide, 9,000 of them in the UK. Peter Fankhauser, the chief executive, called the collapse "a matter of profound regret" and apologised to the company's "millions of customers, and thousands of employees". It felt sudden. The record tells a slower story: one written for years in Thomas Cook's own accounts, in its debts, and on the high street. ## A shilling a head The business began in 1841, when Thomas Cook, a cabinet-maker and former Baptist preacher in Leicestershire, used the new railways to run a 12-mile excursion from Leicester to Loughborough for supporters of the temperance movement. It cost a shilling a head. Cook wanted to give working people something better to do than drink. It worked so well that he did it again, and again. By 1855 he was taking tourists to the Paris International Exhibition, then on to the rest of Europe, America, Asia and the Middle East. His son took over. The company was sold, nationalised as part of British Railways, privatised again, and bought and sold by German owners. Somewhere along the way, "Don't just book it, Thomas Cook it" lodged in the British memory. By 2019 it was a global group with annual sales of around £9 billion, 19 million customers a year and 22,000 staff in 16 countries. It was 178 years old. ## Warning one: a merger that brought debt In 2007 Thomas Cook merged with MyTravel, the owner of Airtours and Going Places. The deal left it carrying a great deal of what accountants call goodwill: value on the balance sheet that depends on brands and customer loyalty rather than planes or hotels. That matters when customers start to leave. As Tim Jeans, a former MyTravel executive, explained to the BBC after the collapse, the firm had very little in the way of tangible assets. When holidaymakers went to online rivals or started booking their own flights and hotels, the value of the business fell with them. The bill for the merger eventually arrived in the accounts. In May 2019 Thomas Cook reported a £1.5 billion loss for the first half of its financial year. £1.1 billion of that was a write-down of the value of MyTravel, twelve years after the deal. ## Warning two: it had nearly died before It had happened once already. In 2011, after trading turned sour, Thomas Cook came perilously close to insolvency. A group of banks led by Royal Bank of Scotland pulled it back with an emergency loan. The problem then was debt: about £2 billion, once the pension deficit was included. In 2013 the company raised £425 million from shareholders to try to put that behind it. By 2019, as the BBC put it, all the rescue money was gone and the debt pile was back to £1.6 billion. The same bank whose loan had saved it in 2011 was among the lenders whose last-minute demand for more money sank it in 2019. In between came the dividends. Thomas Cook stopped paying dividends in 2011 when the first crisis hit. It started paying them again in 2017, and again in 2018\. The BBC called it an odd thing to do if trading and solvency were tight. Its results were also full of exceptional, one-off items, which analysts tend to treat as a red flag. ## Warning three: the shops The third sign was the one you could see from the pavement. While more and more people booked holidays online, Thomas Cook kept a large high-street network. The company had grown its shop estate through acquisitions for decades, and Amie Keeley, head of news at Travel Weekly, pointed to "questionable decisions" years earlier, when a previous management chose to expand the shop network at a time when more people were going online. At the collapse it still had around 560 travel agencies. That meant the overheads of hundreds of shops and thousands of staff, on top of an airline, in a business where customers were extremely price-sensitive and margins were thin. Low-cost airlines and online agents had no such overheads. Easyjet and Jet2 had moved into package holidays too. Tim Jeans summed it up in one line: Thomas Cook had "an analogue business model in a digital world". ## The last summer Then came the one-off shocks that the company leaned on to explain its results: the long heatwave of 2018, which kept British holidaymakers at home, weak sterling, political unrest in destinations such as Turkey and North Africa, and customers holding off booking because of Brexit. Thomas Cook issued three profit warnings in the space of a year. The market had already reached its verdict. In the summer of 2018, Thomas Cook shares traded just below 150p. By May 2019 they were around 20p, and analysts at Citigroup said the shares were "worthless": the tour operator and airline were worth about the same as the debt. The company's auditor, EY, had warned of "material uncertainties" in its results. In August 2019 Thomas Cook agreed a rescue led by Fosun, the Chinese conglomerate that was its largest shareholder. At the last minute, its banks demanded that it find an extra £200 million. It couldn't. The BBC understood that the government had been asked for a bailout of £250 million and refused. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said he feared it would have kept the company afloat "for a very short period of time". The BBC also noted that, over the years, Fankhauser and other executives had received millions of pounds in bonuses, salary and other perks to retain their talents, and wondered how wisely that money had been spent. ![Bronze statue of Thomas Cook outside Leicester railway station](https://redinkblackink.com/content/images/2026/10/thomas-cook-statue-ccbysa4.jpg) The statue of Thomas Cook by Walter Butler outside Leicester railway station, unveiled in 1994\. Photo: Chemical Engineer, [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/?ref=redinkblackink.com), via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thomas%5FCook%5FStatue%5FLeicester%5F2013.jpg?ref=redinkblackink.com). ## After the fall Pieces of Thomas Cook lived on. Hays Travel, the agency built up by a husband-and-wife team, bought 555 of its UK shops. In November 2019 Fosun bought the Thomas Cook brand for £11 million. The statue of Thomas Cook still stands outside Leicester's railway station, in the city where his first excursion began: twelve miles by rail, a shilling a head, on the newest technology of its day. --- **The paper trail.** A merger in 2007, written down by £1.1 billion in 2019\. A rescue in 2011, and debt back to £1.6 billion by 2019\. Dividends resumed in 2017 and 2018\. Three profit warnings in a year. An auditor's note of "material uncertainties". Shares at around 20p. ### Sources - BBC News, "Thomas Cook collapses as last-ditch rescue talks fail", 23 September 2019: [bbc.co.uk](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49791249?ref=redinkblackink.com) - BBC News, "Thomas Cook: What went wrong at the holiday firm?", 23 September 2019: [bbc.com](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46452374?ref=redinkblackink.com) - BBC News, "Thomas Cook: The much-loved travel brand with humble roots", 23 September 2019: [bbc.co.uk](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49789073?ref=redinkblackink.com) - BBC News, "Thomas Cook 'racing to finalise rescue deal'", 15 September 2019: [bbc.co.uk](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49707230?ref=redinkblackink.com) - BBC News, "Thomas Cook shares 'worthless', says Citigroup", May 2019: [bbc.com](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48308001?ref=redinkblackink.com) - BBC News, "Thomas Cook brand sold to Club Med owner Fosun for £11m", 1 November 2019: [bbc.com](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50267453?ref=redinkblackink.com) - The Guardian, "Thomas Cook stores buyer hopes to re-employ entire 2,500 workforce", 9 October 2019: [theguardian.com](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/oct/09/hundreds-of-thomas-cook-jobs-saved-as-uk-stores-bought-up?ref=redinkblackink.com) *Red Ink Black Ink is independent and has no connection with Thomas Cook, Fosun, Hays Travel or anyone named in this story. Photographs are used under the licences shown.*