Thomas Cook Travel Inc.

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Thomas Cook Travel Inc.

100 Cambridge Park Dr.
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02140
U.S.A.
(617) 868-9800

Private Company
Incorporated: 1965
Employees: 2,700
Revenues: $1.7 billion
SICs: 4724 Travel Agencies

Thomas Cook Travel Inc. is the third largest travel agency in the United States, with revenues of more than $1.7 billion annually. Although Thomas Cook Travel is independently owned, it is part of the global network of Thomas Cook Group Ltd, which issued the American company license to use the Cook name.

Thomas Cook Travel’s roots date back to 1841 in Victorian England, when Thomas Cook organized his first chartered excursion aboard an English train. Cook began his travel career at the age of 33, while he was secretary of the Leicester Temperance Society. He convinced his employer to allow him to charter a special train to take members of the society to Lough-borough for a temperance rally. He then appealed to the Midland Counties Railway Company for a chartered train.

The railroad—which was in need of new passengers since rail travel was new, and the public was skeptical about its safety and put off by high fares—agreed to charter a train for Cook at a reasonable cost on Cook’s promise that he could fill it. Cook heavily promoted the train ride and the rally with posters on walls and fences throughout the area. This first Thomas Cook excursion was an overwhelming success: the train was filled, as the rally in Loughborough attracted 2,000 people, many of whom were clearly not advocates of temperance so much as they were anxious to participate in Cook’s adventure.

In 1845, Cook decided to begin arranging tours for the general public as a commercial enterprise. His first tour was to Liverpool, England’s gateway to North Wales and North America at that time. He convinced four railways to let him charter trains at a reduced rate. He also arranged for side tours, wrote and printed a guide book for the trip, and visited hotels and restaurants in Liverpool ahead of time so that he could personally recommend accommodations to his travelers. This first trip was an overwhelming success with the 350 first and second class tickets completely sold out. Cook’s next trip, to Glasgow, Scotland, again sold out the 350 available tickets. Over the next ten years, Cook arranged more tours in Britain as excitement about travel and tourism grew throughout the country.

In 1851 London hosted the Great Exhibition to impress foreign markets with British products and industry as well as to tout the progress brought about through the Industrial Revolution. An opportunity for the country to inspire its own workers with the technological advances being made, the Great Exhibition was also a great impetus for Cook’s travel business. Cook heavily promoted the Great Exhibition among workers and their employers as a unique educational opportunity. He also traveled to London and made arrangements for accommodations affordable to working class travelers. When the fare he arranged with Midland Railway was bettered by a competing rail company, Cook had to renegotiate a lower fare with a guarantee of more passengers.

Soon Cook was looking to the Continent for new destinations. He was also looking to the professional class of teachers, doctors, and clergy as a new market for his travel services. One of the earliest Cook foreign excursions was a trip to the Paris Exhibition in 1855. When the Brighton and South Coast Railway refused to charter a train for Cook, he arranged for his group to travel via a circuitous route through Harwich, Antwerp, and Cologne, and then down the Rhine river to Paris.

The International Exhibition of 1862 in London was an opportunity to recreate the success of the exhibition of 1851. This time, however, Midland Railways decided to handle rail traffic itself, cutting Cook out of the tour business to the event. Undaunted, Cook focused on hotel accommodations for travelers to the event, once again meeting with great success. He was also busy promoting trips to a newly popular destination— the seashore.

Having resolved his difficulties with the Brighton and South Coast Railway, the tours to Paris were more direct, and Cook was ready to announce a tour to Switzerland. Soon, he was arranging tours to Italy as well. Although he did not speak Italian, he managed to convince railway companies and hotels to provide the necessary services and to honor his ticket and coupon system. The Italian tours quickly became his most popular service.

In 1864, Cook entered the guide book business, producing comprehensive guides to his various destinations. The following year, Cook moved his headquarters from Leicester to a building he purchased in London. On the first floor Cook maintained an office and shop, where he sold a wide array of travel products, such as guide books, luggage, telescopes, and footwear. He also ran an advertising agency for provincial and London newspapers. Upstairs were the family living quarters and a Temperance Hotel that he and his wife ran.

As a youth and teenager, John Mason Cook, Cook’s son, had helped out on tours, but had remained in Leicester as a printer when the family moved to London. When Cook and his wife needed help they summoned him to join them. John Mason was reluctant, as he and his father had different views on how the business should be run, but he eventually moved to London to become manager of the London travel office. The London office was a great success. Londoners were eager to book tours on Cook’s Tour and Excursion systems. Railway and hotel managers and owners were also approaching Cook to promote their services.

Cook also began plans for excursions to the United States. He traveled to North American only months after the U.S. Civil War had ended and toured such cities as Detroit, Chicago, Springfield, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., and Baltimore, as well as several cities in Canada. He became convinced that the time was right for a Thomas Cook excursion of English travelers to America. In 1865, the first American tour left England, picking up passengers from several departure points, with John Mason in charge. The trip included a tour of Civil War battlefields.

In 1871, Cook went into partnership with an American, forming Cook, Son and Jenkins, and the company continued its American tours for the English. However, the relationship between John Mason and Jenkins eventually soured, in part because the younger Cook did not approve of Jenkins’s handling of company finances and was convinced that Jenkins’s lavish spending could destroy the company. When John Mason accused the American partner of embezzlement, the partnership was dissolved, and Jenkins brought a legal suit against Cook and his son. Jenkins won the suit and was awarded the grand total of six cents.

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 had opened up travel to India and the Far East, and the first Cook tour around the world was conducted in 1871 with an international group of eleven tourists, including American, British, Scottish, Russian, and Greek travelers. This first tour started with an Atlantic crossing, then a journey across the United States to San Francisco, where the tour caught a ship to Japan, China, and then India and the Red Sea. It then joined up with other Cook tours operating between Cairo and London.

Trips to Egypt had proved quite popular, with tours bringing travelers across Europe by train and then on to Port Said by steamer. There was steady traffic by civil and military personnel as well as British tourists curious to see this country newly available to them. Because Middle East tours usually included a trip to the Holy Land, where there were few hotels and transportation was unreliable, Cook organized his own luxury camps to accommodate his travelers. His caravans moved across the desert with pack animals carrying tourists, supplies, and equipment that included bedsteads and mattresses, carpets for tent floors, and tables and chairs. By the 1890s, business to Egypt was booming. Thomas Cook and Son soon became the largest employer in the country, maintaining office staff, staff for the desert camps, crews on the Nile steamers, attendants for the animals, men at shipbuilding yards to assemble steamers brought in pieces from Britain, and people to grow vegetables and raise chickens to be served to tourists.

Upon his return from a year’s tour around the world in the 1870s, Thomas Cook had a serious disagreement with his son that led to Thomas’s semi-retirement from the company. The relationship between father and son had always been strained, and John Mason finally gave his father an ultimatum stating that he would leave unless his father gave him sole leadership. Thomas, now in his seventies, realized that his son was the better businessman and did as his son demanded. John Mason’s sons, Frank, Ernest, and Thomas, joined the firm in the late 1870s. The three brothers traveled all over the world, and by 1880 they had helped the company expand to 60 offices worldwide. Five years later, there were 120 Cook offices.

John Mason Cook ruled the company autocratically. Running a worldwide company was particularly difficult in those days when travel and communication were slow and arduous. Nevertheless, profits continued to increase, and the Cooks had more business than they could handle. Soon competition in the industry arose, particularly from the firm of Dean and Dawson, which later would become a Cook subsidiary.

By 1876 the company had become particularly familiar to Americans, having established a presence at the American Centennial celebration in Philadelphia. The Cook pavilion was a popular attraction at the Centennial. By the 1880s, most Americans had heard of Thomas Cook and Son’s travel company. In addition to its U.S. and European excursions, the company had begun offering Circular Notes, an early form of travelers’ checks, which became popular as a safe way for Cook’s customers to carry money. The number of hotels that would cash these notes grew steadily, and by 1880, almost 1,000 hotels would cash the checks for tourists in Europe and the United States. During this time, the company also arranged for special immigrant fares to Canada and the United States. Some fares even included a small plot of land on which the new immigrants could build a home. By 1896 Cook’s American business was offering travel arrangements to the Klondike for both Americans and Europeans with gold fever.

The company also developed sea tours. These first “cruises” departed and returned to the same port; travelers spent a holiday at sea with the ship as their hotel. The first such tour was the Midnight Sun Voyage to the North Cape in Scandinavia with the Bergen line of ships in 1875. By the 1890s, shipboard holidays were very popular. After World War I cruise business showed the most growth because the large number of spare ships available allowed ship lines to offer trips at bargain prices. The popularity of cruises continued until World War II erupted.

Thomas Cook died in 1892, and John Mason Cook died only eight years after his father. John Mason’s three sons carried on the family business, and, during their stewardship, Cook began offering the latest mode of travel—flight. Their first venture into air tourism was in 1911 when they made an agreement to sell tickets for excursions of an airship around Lucerne and around Burgenstock and the Righi. Cook received a six percent commission for each passenger booked. In 1919, its first advertisement for airplane flights appeared in The Times, simply offering the opportunity to experience flight. The next year, however, Cook was offering business or pleasure flights aboard converted war-time planes. The company printed a brochure informing travelers that air travel aboard these planes was safe and reliable and that the flight to Paris took just less than three hours. Although competition among the new airlines was fierce, passengers were few. Airlines began offering incentives such as limousine service to the airfield. Gradually, they also started offering food in flight, and by 1927, a full menu was available.

The Cooks set out to make airline contracts all over the world. Passenger flying had begun in the United States in 1926, and the Cooks made contracts there with three airlines. Cook provided passengers and booked reservations, while the airline was responsible for maintaining the planes and providing safe transport.

By 1928, all three of John Mason’s sons had retired from the company, which was then sold to the Belgian Compagnie des Wagons-Lits et des Grands Express Europeens, a company formed by George Nagelmackers in the 1870s to construct and develop the use of sleeping and restaurant cars on trains and which also had established the Orient Express and several luxury hotels.

Under its new ownership, Cook began offering an increasing number of motor tours, including an automobile trip to the desert and the Oasis of Bou-Saada in Algeria. Air traffic also grew in popularity because of the travel time it saved. Although planes could not compete on the transatlantic crossing because they could not carry enough fuel, German zeppelins ran regular flights to Rio de Janeiro and North America. Cook, always at the forefront of travel, advertised these journeys of the Graf Zeppelin which traveled to America and the Middle East and even made a round-the-world flight in 1929. The explosion of the hindenburg at Lakehurst, New Jersey, however, once again virtually eliminated attempts at transatlantic flight. Airplane flights from England to the Middle East and to South Africa were routine as they could be undertaken in stages.

Imperial Airways and Pan American began experimenting with flying boats in the early 1930s, and by 1939 Cook was advertising a round-the-world tour with the Yankee Clipper carrying passengers across the long ocean stretches of the journey. World War II brought an end to travel in many areas of the world, and Cook downsized. However, the company still offered holidays in areas outside the war zones. During the war, Cook operated a letter service through Portugal for people left behind the enemy lines and helped lead evacuations of children after the air raids started. It also lent its Egyptian shipyards for servicing and repairing ships of all kinds and allowed ships from the East Africa war operations to use its workshops for repairing vehicles.

During World War II when the Germans occupied Brussels and Paris, Thomas Cook and Son passed into the hands of the Custodian of Enemy Property. After the war, however, the tourism trade was back in full swing. The British government arranged for the company to be purchased by several British railway companies. When the railways were nationalized in 1948, Thomas Cook also became state-owned.

In 1958, a Boeing 707 crossed the Atlantic. This not only meant the opening of a new mode of transatlantic travel, but it also meant that new, more reliable aircraft were available to tourists, who had until then been reluctant to fly. Accordingly, Thomas Cook faced a new era and increased competition. While Cook had become an institution in England, a new, younger consumer market looked to modern travel companies that could provided unique opportunities. As a state-owned agency, Cook was unable to obtain money for new ventures, such as purchasing its own airline, as some rivals did.

Thomas Cook was sold to Midland Bank in 1974. The following year, Midland Bank sold the U.S. operation to Dun & Bradstreet as a result of federal banking regulations. Under an agreement with Thomas Cook Group Ltd., Dun & Bradstreet continued to use the Cook name and remained part of a network membership agreement. In 1988, Dun & Bradstreet put the business up for sale in order to concentrate only on its traditional services of marketing, credit risk, finance, and directory information.

Publishing magnate Robert Maxwell bought Thomas Cook the next year and renewed the licensing agreement to use the Cook name. Thomas Cook Travel Inc. generated business of about $365 million. It had 60 full service locations, including nine regional reservation centers. Although industry members speculated that Maxwell would sell the company, since his main business activity was publishing, he maintained that he had big plans to make Thomas Cook a dominant force in the U.S. travel business through the acquisition of other companies.

In 1989 Thomas Cook joined forces with Crimson/Heritage Travel to form a $1.3 billion company and instantly jumped in rankings to become the third largest travel company in the United States. Maxwell and David Paresky, founder and president of Crimson Travel, each owned a 50 percent share of the new Thomas Cook Travel. Paresky became president, chairman, and chief executive officer of the newly-merged company. He relocated company headquarters to Cambridge, Massachusetts, from New York City.

When Maxwell died suddenly in 1991, his 50 percent share of Thomas Cook was eyed by many potential buyers, including Midland Bank, which had made itself eligible by selling the bank that conflicted with further U.S. operations. However, Paresky had the right of first refusal, and in 1993, he and his wife Linda, vice-chairwoman of the company, purchased the Maxwell share.

Thomas Cook Travel, the U.S. operation, had about 700 offices in 45 states and Washington, D.C. in 1993 and had become predominantly a corporate agency, handling the travel of some of the largest companies in the country. Business travel revenues accounted for 84 percent of the company’s revenues that year. The company also operated a franchise program with more than 40 locations.