Travel

Thomas Cook travel chaos: firm's collapse leaves 150,000 stranded abroad – live updates


Officials talk with passengers at the Thomas Cook Check-In desks at the South Terminal of London Gatwick Airpor.

Officials talk with passengers at the Thomas Cook Check-In desks at the South Terminal of London Gatwick Airport. Photograph: Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images

Passengers scheduled to fly out with Thomas Cook today still turned up at Gatwick airport, with several saying they had been unaware of the company’s collapse until they were on their way or upon arrival at the airport.
Ruth Caruana, 48, came to the deserted Thomas Cook desk with her husband and daughter to enquire about her flight back home to Malta. “I tried to check in last night, but they wouldn’t let me,” Caruana said. At the airport, she was told by a stand-in Tui member of staff that she would have to attempt to rebook with another airline.

Caruana told us:


“We booked three weeks ago and paid about €700.

We‘ve been scammed, if they knew they were going to close down they shouldn’t have let us buy the tickets. We have nowhere to stay now. I will now try to get another flight, I hope the insurance will cover it,“

John Bell and his family also approached the Thomas Cook desk to get information about their flight to Dalaman, Turkey, for a two-week holiday, which puts their return flights outside the two-week period in which stranded passengers with booked plane tickets will be offered an airlift home by the government.
“We found out at half three this morning,” Bell said.


“We booked through Love Holidays, and used a credit card, so hopefully that’ll give us some protection. Everything is getting booked up real fast now, so we don’t know when or if we will be going.”

Bell said he thought it was possible Brexit had something to do with the downfall of Thomas Cook.


“Then again, their troubles have been going on for years.”

Friends Judy and Sheila were scheduled to fly out for a 7-day holiday in Antalya and found out about the collapse of the holiday giant when they arrived at Gatwick airport, where they were handed a printed information letter by Thomas Cook.
Like many others, they had booked a package via a third party operator, Broadway Travel, a mere two weeks ago, which included flights with Thomas Cook. “We even have our boarding passes for our flight that is now not going to happen,“ Sheila said.


“We were told to try and rebook, our travel operator said we should pay for new tickets and would then get reimbursed, but I‘m sure any extras like transfers we‘ll have to pay for will leave us out of pocket.“

The friends were able to rebook tickets for a flight just before 10pm with another airline, for a small fortune they said, and were told by their travel operator they would be refunded for the original cost of the Thomas Cook flights.

“I asked, ‘what about the additional cost?’, but they haven’t said anything about that,” Judy said.

“All I want to do is lie down,” Sheila added.

By midday, only a handful of travellers were queued at the customer service desk to rebook their flights.

Carita Kuivamaki, 27 and Niklas Koski, 26, both from Finland but living in Malta, found out on their journey to the airport that their flights home had been scrapped. They had come to London for a company business trip.

“We heard about it on the train,” Koski said. Kuivamaki said they spotted the story of the collapse in a newspaper, adding:


We‘ll book flights for tomorrow.



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