Thomas Cook is back and jumping head first into travel industry hell

Atol and Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) staff could be forgiven for seeking out a dark room in which to hide. 

The return of Thomas Cook has been announced. That’s right. The brand at the centre of the travel sector’s biggest, and messiest, collapse, and their most painful headache has been resurrected as a new company.

The demise of the ‘old’ Thomas Cook left them, along with the Department of Transport, coping with the largest peacetime repatriation Britain has yet seen while also having to handle refunds for those who had yet to travel with the firm. It was a cluster – you know what – of epic proportions. 

The announcement must have left them feeling like Shelley Duvall’s Wendy Torrance did when Jack Nicholson did his “Here’s Johnny!” routine while playing her axe-wielding husband in Kubrick’s classic The Shining. 

Ditto an awful lot of customers caught up in the repatriation, customers who didn’t imagine they’d be spending their holidays on the phone trying to find out if and when they’d be able to get home. 

A total of 150,000 people were left in that unfortunate position.

That being the case, you’d wonder at the wisdom of Fosun, the Chinese company that was Cook’s biggest shareholder before the business went down the toilet, in reviving the brand even if we weren’t in the middle of a pandemic. 

But we are, which means the new outfit is jumping feet first into travel industry hell.

This will, of course, be a very different Thomas Cook to what went before. Instead of having a payroll made up of 20,000 plus employees, the new outfit, run by former managers, has just 50.  And there’s no network of shops.

 This is a digital-only operation, a sort of mini Expedia but not as big or well established, which is only booking trips to Covid clear locales.

“We want to give you certainty when you book so we only offer destinations with no quarantine,” the website declares. 

The problem with that isn’t hard to see. Part of the travel industry’s nightmare has been caused by the fact that the government has been revising and updating its quarantine list every week.

Travel corridors have had a nasty habit of closing, forcing holidaymakers to scramble to get home before the curtain falls, and requiring tour operators to pay refunds. 

“Love this,” the home page says, overlaying a picture of a father with a daughter on his shoulders, looking out over a blue sky. 

Trouble is “this” could easily be replaced by four bare walls and a Nintendo to get through 14 days of self isolation when you get home if the corridor is closed and your family doesn’t get out fast enough. 

The name ‘Thomas Cook’ already has some bad associations. Do they seriously want to add that to the enormous repatriation necessitated by some fairly horrible financial mismanagement by overpaid executives over several years.

 I suppose what the people behind this are resting their hopes on is that the brand may still have positive associations among those who had happy experiences with it in the past. In the digital marketplace name recognition counts for a lot and Thomas Cook still has that, even if not always for the best reasons. 

Still, travelling at all in the age of Covid requires nerves of steel. Rolling the dice with the revived outfit almost pales by comparison to the other potential hazards, so maybe those brave enough to book will be brave enough to Thomas Cook. 

If the company can sort these intrepid travellers out successfully, and if it survives the trial by coronavirus fire that opening any business demands in the current climate, maybe the new customers will tell their friends who’re waiting until things look a little brighter. 

But it doesn’t bode well that when I initially clicked on the “book with confidence” tab on the website I got a white screen and a bad pathway message. 

Half an hour later it had been fixed and I was greeted by a couple of models floating in a pool along with some blurb saying “we’re Atol protected and operate on a trust account model”. 

Here’s Johnny!