Tue, Sep 24, 2019 page1

• Thomas Cook collapse strands travelers worldwide

  • AP, LONDON
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  Hundreds of thousands of travelers were stranded across the world yesterday after British tour company Thomas Cook collapsed, immediately halting almost all its flights and hotel services and laying off all its employees.

  Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority confirmed that Thomas Cook, a 178-year-old company that helped create the package tour industry, had ceased trading.

  It said the firm’s four airlines would be grounded, and its 21,000 employees in 16 countries — including 9,000 in the UK — would lose their jobs.

  

  Stranded British tourists booked with Thomas Cook line up at Enfidha-Hammamet International Airport, south of Tunis, Tunisia, yesterday.

  Photo: AFP

  The collapse of the firm will have sweeping effects across the entire European and North African tourism industry and elsewhere, as hotels worried about being paid and confirmed bookings for high-season winter resorts were suddenly in doubt.

  Overall, about 600,000 people were traveling with the company as of Sunday, although it was unclear how many of them would be left stranded, as some travel subsidiaries were in talks with local authorities to continue operating.

  The British government said it was taking charge of getting the firm’s 150,000 UK-based customers back home from vacation spots across the globe, the largest repatriation effort in the country’s peacetime history.

  

  Thomas Cook staff speak with British passengers at Palma de Mallorca airport in Spain yesterday.

  Photo: AP

  The process began yesterday and officials warned of delays.

  A stream of reports yesterday morning gave some sense of the extent of the travel chaos: About 50,000 Thomas Cook travelers were stranded in Greece; up to 30,000 stuck in Spain’s Canary Islands; 21,000 in Turkey and 15,000 in Cyprus.

  An estimated 1 million future Thomas Cook travelers also found their bookings for upcoming holidays canceled.

  The company has been struggling financially for years due to competition from budget airlines and the ease of booking low-cost accommodations through the Internet. It owns almost 600 travel shops on major streets in Britain as well as 200 hotels, adding real-estate costs to its crushing debt burden.

  Things got worse this year, with the company blaming a slowdown in bookings on the uncertainty over Brexit, while a drop in the pound made it more expensive for British vacationers to travel abroad.

  The company on Friday said it was seeking ￡200 million (US$250 million) to avoid going bust and held talks over the weekend with shareholders and creditors.

  Chief executive Peter Fankhauser said in a statement read outside the company’s offices before dawn yesterday that he deeply regrets the shutdown.

  “Despite huge efforts over a number of months and further intense negotiations in recent days, we have not been able to secure a deal to save our business,” he said. “I know that this outcome will be devastating to many people and will cause a lot of anxiety, stress and disruption.”

  Britain’s aviation authority said it had arranged an aircraft fleet for the complex repatriation effort, which is expected to last two weeks.

  British Secretary of State for Transport Grant Shapps said dozens of charter planes, from as far as Malaysia, had been hired to fly customers home free of charge and that hundreds of people were staffing call centers and airport operations centers.

  British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, traveling to New York City for the UN General Assembly, said the government was right not to bail out the company, because travel firms should do more to ensure they do not collapse.

  The Spanish government yesterday was holding meetings with regional authorities to assess the likely damage to local economies.

  The Tunis Afrique Presse agency said Tunisia’s tourism minister intervened after reports that Thomas Cook tourists at one hotel in Hammamet were locked into the hotel and “being held hostage” until they paid their bills for fear that Thomas Cook would not pay its debts.
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