"Don't just book It" and Memories of the Pre-Internet Era

I'm old.

Okay, I'm not grey wrinkly hospital visits every month old.

But I'm not a spring chicken, not any more.

I have memories of going to the travel agent in the grocery store (loyalty bonus!) and looking through catalogues of package deals. We'd pick the one we wanted and that was it.

Now, I spend hours on the internet and do the travel agent's job, customizing our itinerary, finding hotels. As it happens, I enjoy it. For those who don't, the package deal still exists.

Which brings us to "Don't just book it. Thomas Cook it!" The 1980s slogan of the British package deal operator that dramatically collapsed, stranding 150,000 tourists overseas and ruining the trips of over half a million. Because, yes, that many people are still booking package deals.

The company started in 1841 with day trips by rail from Leicester to Loughborough (where I attended high school!). They arranged day trips for temperance society members and Sunday schools. In 1845 they opened it up commercially and the first overseas tour was in 1855. Which was also the first true package deal, as far as I know.

Cook spawned countless imitators. Their red-branded store fronts were, in the 1980s, everywhere. We used smaller operators (loyalty bonus!) but "Thomas Cook" meant "package holiday" to many people. When the age of mass air travel hit in the 1960s...

Enter the internet. Hotels used to rent rooms they couldn't fill cheap to the tour operators. Expedia has bought up much of that stock (As a note: I never use Expedia or similar services and do not recommend them).

More people are able to plan their own trips. Hotels can now sell direct to customers all over the world, with varying degrees of success. You can get a better deal on flights by just buying from the airlines. Kids these days don't go through glossy brochures in a comfortable office while their families discuss whether to go to Rhodes or Crete.

It really was a different time. The internet existed in the UK in the 1980s for rich people (you had to pay by time for the dial up and then again by time for your access).

And the collapse of Thomas Cook feels like some part of that era has gone inexorably into the past, never to be recovered. I want to live in the future. But, I suppose, I also have the same vulnerability to nostalgia as anyone else.