Thomas Cook has gone bust because it was a badly run business which travelled in the wrong direction and took too much baggage. In the words of one former executive, it was an “analogue business in a digital world.”
Put simply, Britain’s oldest tour operator has been stuck in a world of Sixties-style mass-market holiday packages, travellers cheques ( which it created) and dull high street branches that looked as though they too were stuck in the Sixties.
When Thomas Cook went into liquidation earlier today it had no cash in the bank, no serious tangible assets only intangibles ones, about £1bn in debt and a £500m pension fund deficit.
