Why Thomas Cook Faltered As Urban Tourism Boomed

Today the tourism industry is reeling today from some major news: Britain’s largest travel company, Thomas Cook, has just declared bankruptcy, leaving a staggering 600,000 people stranded abroad with their flights cancelled. The logistics of managing this volume of marooned vacationers are of the sort normally associated with major disasters or wars. For the 150,000 stranded customers who are British, the U.K. government has just announced a $124 million two-week operation to fly them home, the largest repatriation in the country’s peacetime history.

Meanwhile, as the rescue operation kicks into gear, people are already conducting a post mortem into the death of this 178-year-old travel-industry leviathan—a British household name, with storefronts offering all-in-one resort vacations on almost every main street in the country. Among the causes, one striking possibility has emerged: Did the apparently unstoppable rise of the city break cause the company’s demise?