[UPDATED 21 SEPTEMBER 2019]

According to Sky News Thomas Cook are now [21-9-2019]seeking government finance in order to avoid collapse. There are 165,000 Thomas Cook customers currently overseas.


This photograph relates to a worker sit-in [lock-out] that took place in Dublin in August 2009.

More than 40 workers, including two pregnant women, occupied the company's outlet in Grafton Street, Dublin, after management announced the immediate closure of the company’s two offices in the city.

According to local media: "28 employees of the Thomas Cook travel agency, who had been taking part in a sit-in at the company's offices in Grafton Street, have been arrested. They were detained at 5am this morning and have been taken to the Bridewell Garda Station ahead of their appearance in court later today. A Thomas Cook worker who was eight-and-a-half months pregnant was taken to hospital this morning after going into labour."


Thomas Cook (22[1] November 1808 – 18 July 1892) was an English businessman. He is best known for founding the travel agency Thomas Cook & Son. Cook's idea to offer excursions came to him while "walking from Market Harborough to Leicester to attend a meeting of the Temperance Society". With the opening of the extended Midland Counties Railway, he arranged to take a group of temperance campaigners from Leicester Campbell Street railway station to a teetotal rally in Loughborough, eleven miles away. On 5 July 1841, Thomas Cook escorted around 500 people, who paid one shilling each for the return train journey, on his first excursion. During the following three summers he planned and conducted outings for local temperance societies and Sunday school children.

On 4 August 1845 he arranged for a party to travel from Leicester to Liverpool. In 1846, he took 350 people from Leicester on a tour of Scotland. In 1851 he arranged for 150,000 people to travel to the Great Exhibition in London. Four years later, he planned his first excursion abroad, when he took two groups on a 'grand circular tour' of Belgium, Germany and France, ending in Paris for the Exhibition. During the 1860s he took parties to Switzerland, Italy, Egypt and the United States.