A2QFI
If EZ can give you unlimited cabin baggage, by weight, free why do TC have to limit everyone to 5kg?
Personal Opinion: Because T Cook & Sons have fallen through a hole in the middle.
Cooks have been, in the very modern sense 'disintermediated'. Cooks made their name and fortune by being the intermediary of transport and accommodation. They bridged the gap of language and country and currency. You could rely on them (and their competitors) to know the answers to difficult questions about hotels and inoculations and
anything in the foreign land. They created a market and so, of course, many tried to take that market away from them:
- Very serious competition throughout the 1980s and 90s.
- LCC carriers.
- The Internet.
- Debit/Credit cards that work across sovereign borders
- Multinational companies (carriers, hotel chains etc.)
- Transport companies dealing more directly with their customer: air, train, ship, coach.
The customer can now book the transport directly, perhaps get their friends in the destination country to book the hotel, use the Net to book the scenic train journey etcetera.
Cooks (and others) no longer have the full range of travel components under their control. Their revenues decline because their defined market is shrinking. They are struggling to redefine themselves and have to cut costs at every corner. Further consolidation will follow. I say this with no pleasure, it's just what has happened to countless numbers of business' across the developed world.
I'm a particularly independently minded traveller and I have not used a travel agent since December 1988. It never occurs to me to use an agent or package dealer, as I can find all the elements I want online or through friends and prefer to deal directly with those supplying the transport/hotel.
Wikipedia tells me that Thomas Cook arranged his first excursion in 1841.
Thomas Cook - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The group that now has the name is still around some 170 years later. Most companies do not make it past 100 years, so they have done remarkably well, especially since he was on the verge of bankruptcy within his first ten years. Reading the potted history of the company and it's numerous financing problems, takeovers and mergers is very interesting. I expect that the name will continue.