The demise of Thomas Cook was more a failure of corporate finance than a failure of travel, according to ABTA chief executive Mark Tanzer.
Speaking to delegates at this week’s Convention in Tokyo, he said the fact that the company sold £9.5 billion of holidays last year and had a million people either abroad or ready to travel showed it was ‘clearly doing something right’.
"The depiction of it as a dinosaur in a digital age really masks the true problem," he told delegates.
He said the £1.2 billion paid by Thomas Cook in finance charges, plus ‘goodness knows how much in advisory fees’ were profits from its holiday business.
"This is money that in a more balanced financial model would have been available to invest and develop the business," said Tanzer.
He said the pain of the Thomas Cook failure is being felt widely in the industry.
"There is a lot of anger and fear, and the desire to look for someone to blame is understandable," he told delegates.
"But we really do have to work together at this moment, to maintain customer confidence, to find new homes for displaced businesses, and to try to recruit former Thomas Cook staff, who constitute an immense repository of talent and experience.
"When that job is done, we can and should ask what lessons can be learned, especially about when money is collected and when it passed on, when people and companies are financially protected and when not. And at the very least we need to ensure that everyone in the chain understands the system and makes commercial decisions on an informed basis."
