Posted on 09/22/2019 7:17:23 PM PDT by Berlin_Freeper
Thomas Cook (TCG.L), the world’s oldest travel firm, collapsed on Monday, stranding hundreds of thousands of holidaymakers around the globe and sparking the largest peacetime repatriation effort in British history.
Chief Executive Peter Fankhauser said it was a matter of profound regret that the company had gone out of business after it failed to secure a rescue package from its lenders.
The UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) said Thomas Cook had now ceased trading and the regulator and government would work together to bring the more than 150,000 British customers home over the next two weeks.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
What happens when you forget your passport,
And then your flip-flops...
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-kent-49724851
Wow. Bailing out on 150,000 live customers. Makes no sense. Must have has some pretty bad management.
I can see future plans being disrupted but how are your current travelers’ flights/cruises not already PAID for?
It’s not like I can go to southwest and say I’ll pay you Tuesday for a flight today?!
Thomas Cook was running its own Brexit program?
Started in 1841, wow.
What a loss.
All I can think of is the Monty Python Travel Agent skit...
Tourist Yes I quite agree with you, I mean what’s the point of being treated like a sheep, I mean I’m fed up with going abroad and being treated like a sheep, what’s the point of being carted around in buses surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and Boventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their ‘Sunday Mirrors’, complaining about the tea, ‘Oh they don’t make it properly here do they not like at home’ stopping at Majorcan bodegas, selling fish and chips and Watney’s Red Barrel and calamares and two veg and sitting in cotton sun frocks squirting Timothy White’s suncream all over their puffy raw swollen purulent flesh cos they ‘overdid it on the first day’!
Bounder (agreeing patiently) Yes. Absolutely, yes, I quite agree...
Tourist And being herded into endless Hotel Miramars and Bellvueses and Bontinentals with their international luxury modern roomettes and their Watney’s Red Barrel and their swimming pools full of fat German businessmen pretending they’re acrobats and forming pyramids and frightening the children and barging in to the queues and if you’re not at your table spot on seven you miss your bowl of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup, the first item on the menu of International Cuisine, and every Thursday night there’s a bloody cabaret in the bar featuring some tiny emaciated dago with nine-inch hips and some big fat bloated tart with her hair brylcreemed down and a big arse presenting Flamenco for Foreigners.
Bounder (beginning to get fed up) Yes, yes, now...
Tourist And then some adenoidal typists from Birmingham with diarrhoea and flabby white legs and hairy bandy-legged wop waiters called Manuel, and then, once a week there’s an excursion to the local Roman ruins where you can buy cherryade and melted ice cream and bleedin’ Watney’s Red Barrel, and one night they take you to a local restaurant with local colour and colouring and they show you there and you sit next to a party of people from Rhyl who keeps singing ‘Torremolinos, Torremolinos’ and complaining about the food - ‘Oh! It’s so greasy isn’t it?’ and then you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic and Dr Scholl sandals and last Tuesday’s ‘Daily Express’ and he drones on and on and on about how Mr. Smith should be running this country and how many languages Enoch Powell can speak and then he throws up all over the Cuba Libres.
Bounder Will you be quiet please.
Tourist And sending tinted postcards of places they don’t know they haven’t even visited, ‘to all at number 22, weather wonderful, our room is marked with an “X”. Wish you were here.’
Bounder Shut up.
Tourist ‘Food very greasy but we have managed to find this marvellous little place hidden away in the back streets.’
Bounder Shut up!
Tourist ‘Where you can even get Watney’s Red Barrel and cheese and onion...’
Bounder Shut up!!!
Tourist ‘...crisps and the accordionist plays “Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner”’ and spending four days on the tarmac at Luton airport on a five-day package tour with nothing to eat but dried Watney’s sandwhiches....
Bounder Shut your bloody gob! I’ve had enough of this, I’m going to ring the police.
He dials and waits. Cut to a corner of a police station. One policeman is knitting, another is making a palm tree out of old newspapers. The phone rings.
Knitting Policeman Oh...take it off the hook. (they do so)
Cut back to travel agent’s office. The man is still going on, the travel agent looks crossly at the phone and puts it down. Then picks it up and dials again.
Bounder Hello operator, operator...I’m trying to get the police...the police yes, what? (takes off his shoe and looks inside) nine and a half, nine and a half, yes, yes...I see...well can you keep trying please...
Through all this the tourist is still going on:
Tourist ...and there’s nowhere to sleep and the kids are vomitting and throwing up on the plastic flowers and they keep telling you it’ll only be another hour although your plane is still in Iceland waiting to take some Swedes to Yugoslavia before it can pick you up on the tarmac at 3 a.m. in the bloody morning and you sit on the tarmac till six because of ‘unforeseen difficulties’. i.e. the permanent strike of Air Traffic Control in Paris, and nobody can go to the lavatory until you take off at eight, and when you get to Malaga airport everybody’s swallowing Enterovioform tablets and queuing for the toilets and when you finally get to the hotel, there’s no water in the taps, there’s no water in the pool, there’s no water in the bog and there’s a bleeding lizard in the bidet, and half the roo
Aren’t they required to buy tickets with the revenue they get from customers and then get reimbursed a markup from the hotel or airline to make their profit? This should not have caused a stranding unless they were taking the money of clients and using it for payroll.
I remember back in the 1980s, they had very informative rail timetables that were useful in planning my trip to the continent. My friends and I bought Eurail passes and determined how best to spend as much travel time as possible in sleeper cars going from one city to another so we wouldn’t have to pay for a hotel nor waste a lot of fun time stuck in some rail car. Worked out pretty well. Now, I wouldn’t go back, not with “no go” zones and jihadi Muslims prowling about looking for infidels to kill.
ff
Yep. What a fall.
Most likely the travel agency reimburses the carrier at the end of the month, etc. In other words, the carrier extends credit to the agency. If the agency is not solvent then the carrier stops accepting passengers booked through that agency.
It’s not like I can go to southwest and say I’ll pay you Tuesday for a flight today?!
I think the various vendors don't get paid till the services are rendered. People pay in advance to Thomas Cooke, and Thomas Cooke pays the vendors as they provide the services.
Sounds like how our government runs Social Security...
How many of these British subjects are muzzies visiting in their motherland, seeking a way to get back into England?
Those lymies-we really gave it to them at Yorktown and Bunker Hill.
...and now for something completely different!
Did Thomas Cook issue their own traveler’s checks of some sort?
[Thomas Cook had now ceased trading and the regulator and government would work together to bring the more than 150,000 British customers home over the next two weeks]
Thanks customers! Hope ya don’t starve to death or mind sleeping on the streets until then! Like us on Facebook!
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