When the smoke had cleared last Sunday....around three-quarters of a million Europeans (mostly Brits and Germans) were screwed. You basically had four groups with problems:
1. The ones on holiday already. These folks found that the return airline tickets were no longer going to work.....no one was there to help with plan 'B'....and the hotels were asking them to pay for what the travel company had signed to pay them already. Yes, there is a general insurance fund to cover episodes like this, but the amount in the fund has a limit, and based on legal opinions offered so far....the best you might hope for is 50-percent of your money returned.
2. The hotels. The bulk of them were expecting their contracted money a month after the trip concluded. Those hotels will likely not see much of the money, but through legal methods.....might get some back. For hotels in Turkey, who'd suffered economically in 2017 and 2018....it's a harsh episode.
3. The folks who were supposed to be leaving this week or over the next four months for their trip. Even with the deposit down and tickets in their hands....it's worthless. These people already have leave scheduled, and some may have laid down 2,000 Euro just on airline tickets. I watched some interview yesterday where the lady grumbled that her trip (just paid in the past ten days) for spring of 2020....is questionable, and she has zero confidence about the full amount coming back to her.
4. Finally, the people who are unaffected but now have a strong distrust of the entire travel industry based on the fall-out of this Cook episode.
If you go out and chat with middle-class Germans....just about everyone will admit in the past decade to having used travel agencies for package-tours on a dozen-odd occasions. Some were just weekend trips to Amsterdam or Paris....some were week-long trips to the Greek isles.....some were two-week packages to Thailand.
People liked the simplicity of the package deal. You pay the money, and from the minute you arrive at the airport....things are taken care of. You'd arrive at the destination airport, and a bus would be there to take you onto the hotel. Everything at the hotel was written out and clear. A bus would bring you from the hotel back to the airport, and you'd come back home with no issues.
For me, it's been fifteen years since I used a travel agency package tour. I grumbled about that last trip, and decided I could do a better job of planning than these companies. The internet gave me every single tool to gauge prices, find discounts, and hire up shuttle rides for the airport business.
So what happens in 2020? I'm predicting that a mass number of German regular package tour customers will refuse to deal with the travel companies.....even if they discount their prices (a serious mistake). I think a lot of Germans will travel off to Czech, France, Poland and Italy....by car or rail. I think those who don't get much of their money back....will turn their backs permanently on the travel industry. Greece and Turkey? They might lose a third of their normal business because of this Thomas Cook episode.....which is amusing that they did nothing wrong and were more or less the innocent bystander.
Onto the last observation, which you have to wonder about. If X-number of Euro went into the pot, to cover hotels and expenses....where did all the profits disappear to? Or was the whole Thomas Cook thing one giant pyramid-scheme?
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