A package holiday or package tour
consists of transport and accommodation advertised and
sold
together by a vendor known as a tour operator. Other services
may be provided like a rental car, activities or outings during
the holiday. Transport can be via charter airline to a foreign
country.
Package holidays are organised by a tour operator and sold to a
consumer by a travel agent. Some travel agents are owned by tour
operators, others are independent.
Organised Tours
The first organised tours dated back to Thomas Cook who, on 5
July 1841, chartered a train to take a group of temperance
campaigners from Leicester to a rally in Loughborough, twenty
miles away. Thomas Cook - the company - grew to become one of
the largest and most well known travel agents before being
nationalised in 1948. With the gradual decline of visits to
British seaside resorts after the Second World War, Thomas Cook
began promoting foreign holidays (particularly Italy, Spain and
Switzerland) in the early 1950s. Information films were shown at
town halls throughout Britain. However they made a costly
decision by not going into the new form of cheap holidays which
combined the transport and accommodation arrangements into a
single 'package'. The company went further into decline and were
only rescued by a consortium buy-out on 26 May 1972
Package Tours
Vladimir Raitz, the co-founder of the Horizon Holiday Group,
pioneered the first mass package holidays abroad with charter
flights between Gatwick airport and Corsica in 1950, and
organised the first package holiday to Palma in 1952, Lourdes in
1953, and the Costa Brava and Sardinia in 1954. In addition, the
amendments made in Montreal to the Convention on International
Civil Aviation on June 14, 1954 was very liberal to Spain,
allowing impetus for mass tourism using charter planes.
By the late 1950s and 1960s, these cheap package holidays -
which combined flight, transfers and accommodation - provided
the first chance for most people in the United Kingdom to have
affordable travel abroad. One of the first charter airlines was
Euravia, which commenced flights from Manchester Airport in 1961
and Luton Airport in 1962. Despite opening up mass tourism to
Crete and the Algarve in 1970, the package tour industry
declined during the 1970s. On 15 August 1974, the industry was
shaken when the second-largest tour operator, Court Line which
operated under the brand names of Horizon and Clarksons,
collapsed. Nearly 50,000 tourists were stranded overseas and a
further 100,000 faced the loss of booking deposits.
Recently a growing number of consumers are avoiding package
holidays and instead are travelling with budget airlines and
booking their own accommodation. In the UK, the downturn in the
package holiday market led to the consolidation of the tour
operator market, which is now dominated by a few large tour
operators. The major operators are Thomson Holidays, part of the
TUI AG, Thomas Cook AG, MyTravel, and First Choice. Under these
umbrella brands there exists a whole range of different holiday
operators catering to different markets, such as Club 18-30 or
Simply Travel.
