Many blamed the shops for dragging the rest of the group down. The really is that TCG imploded under debt from a series of acquisitions. Its happened time and again, Swissisr being one of the most famous, but House of Fraiser are another example. The difficulty in an integrated model like TCG no-one can truly tell which part of the business pays for marketing, IT, HR, Training, H&S, etc. It's not even that easy to tell where the money is coming from. If someone buys a Thomas Cook Airlines flight via a TC store how do you allocate the revenue? An industry-standard commission structure, perhaps? But if that store didn't exist would the passenger have booked with TCX, or ended up on Virgin, for example?
Hopefully Hays can make a go of this, the scale of expansion is huge. Apparently 55 stores will open today. Thats a huge sumner of stores to open in one day, with a defunct brand and no Thomas Cook product to sell. I assume they paid next-to-nothing for the travel agent business, essentially they are taking over the leases. There is no mention of being able to use the Thomas Cook brand or TUPE of staff.