From Thomson Cruises to Marella: a strange tale of travel rebranding

As a brand, Thomson was far from ideal. The name of Britain’s biggest holiday company was misspelt only slightly less frequently than that of the Australian airline, Qantas (“Thompson” and “Quantas” respectively).

While the name of its venerable rival Thomas Cook celebrates a pioneer of mass travel, the Tommy-come-lately was named after a Canadian media baron, Roy Thomson.

But the Thomson travel conglomerate has quite a backstory. It was created from Britannia Airways, Gaytours, Luxitours, Riviera and Skytours in 1965, even before England won the World Cup. Over more than half a century, it has delivered 100 million holidays, the vast majority of them thoroughly enjoyable and good value. And while not everyone can spell Thomson correctly, most of us can say it right.

Unlike the new brand which officially replaced Thomson at one minute past midnight on Wednesday: TUI.

“Chewy”? “Too-ee”? “T-U-I”? I heard each of these pronunciations from broadcasters on what was presumably known, at TUI HQ, as T-Day. The preferred version is “Too-ee”, because that’s the way they say it in Germany – where it is the acronym for a long-established holiday firm, Touristik Union International.

By the firm’s own admission, the company’s corporate history has not been entirely a proud one. The enterprise that was to become the world’s biggest holiday firm was founded by the State of Prussia as the Prussian Mining and Metallurgical Company – or Preussag for short – in 1923.

“With its key activities in coal, oil, potash, salt and nonferrous metals it was inevitable that Preussag would become a major pillar of the National Socialist (Nazi) autarchy and armaments programmes,” the official online history admits frankly, before moving on to the post-war achievement of building the biggest travel business in Europe – including buying up Thomson in 2000.

With mining and metallurgy superseded by mass mobility, and Prussia long erased as a geo-political unit, Preussag itself rebranded in 2002 as TUI – short for Touristik Union International, one of the firms it had swallowed as it grew. The headquarters are in Hanover, but the UK remains a critically important part of the business. The firm left the rebranding of Thomson to last, but as from this week everything is TUI. Except the parts that aren’t.

One of these is Crystal Ski, a big, successful standalone business that trades on its winter-sports reputation. Another is Marella.

Who?

It’s the line formerly known as Thomson Cruises. Why not just turn it into TUI Cruises? Because of concern, apparently, that British customers might confuse it with TUI’s German cruise business.

Having been on a few Thomson cruises over the years, I suspect that my shipmates and I can spot the difference. One has vessels called Majesty and Spirit, and serves “bacon butties for breakfast”; the other operates from Kiel and Bremerhaven and will shortly get new ships called Mein Schiff 1 and Mein Schiff 2 (the existing vessels with those names are being Anglicised and going to Thomson; sorry, Marella).

“Marella means ‘shining sea’,” says the company. “It beautifully captures who we are and what we do.”

Were I to suggest Marella as a brand for anything, it would be a seasickness cure. It also sounds uncomfortably close to a nasty mosquito-borne disease, which some may find repellant.

Chewy – sorry, TUI – shareholders should hope that the name change is more successful than Thomas Cook’s disastrous 1999 identity adventure, when it forsook heritage and rebranded all its holidays as “JMC” (randomly, the initials of John Mason Cook, Thomas’s son).

The travelling public was unimpressed with the move; three years and tens of millions of wasted cash later, the firm’s packages were un-rebranded to Thomas Cook.