Thomas Cook, Britain’s most recognized travel agency is becoming one of the country’s ultimate corporate disasters. On Monday, the company left around 150,000 vacationers stuck on foreign land. This incident has put roughly 21,000 jobs at risk. This incident also provoked calls for an examination of its management. 150 years of popular tourism is being destroyed by greed and incompetence. The company has diverse theories for its downfall. The company reported a massive loss of 1.5 billion pounds in May. In 2018, heatwave reduced demand. According to the company’s CEO Peter Fankhauser, the company gone through uncertainties around the Brexit. He stated that Brexit led several U.K. customers to postpone their holiday plans for the summer.
Some analyzers are calling Thomas Cook as the first major casualty of Brexit. The simultaneous decline in the pound is considered as the significant effect of the Brexit. The volatility in pound made holidays financially discouraging. Long in the past, the ballot was even put up for a vote the company’s fortune was wrapped. For many years, Thomas Cook engaged a somewhat hysterical and enormously expensive game because the company tried to step foot into the digital age. In the end, the company was grinding under a debt of $2.1 billion due to expensive, intrusive investments made long ago. The most arguable investment is a merger with MyTravel, which was a British competitor. By 2011, the cash crunch was in progress, when the company requested moneylenders for an investment of about $125 million.
The incident with travelers has cost the British government around £100 million, which roughly becomes $125 million to bring back the customers. The situation is being called the biggest peacetime repatriation of the country’s history. All that is left in Thomas cook is investor’s regret. Recently, a Turkish businessman, Neset Kockar took a stake of 8 percent in the company. After the collapse the businessman stated that he was not aware of the real situation. No company can make such mistakes one after another.
