Page 404 - Tech Troubles Cooked The Travel Agent

Barry Collins says technology is partly to blame for Thomas Cook’s demise

- Barry Collins

“Don’t just book it, ThomasCook it,” was the now-defunct travel agent’s slogan when I was a kid. If my recent experience of booking online with the company is anything to go by, the slogan should have been “you just can’t book it when you Thomas Cook it”.

Like virtually every travel-agent website I can think of, Thomas Cook did a woeful job of handling online bookings. My efforts to secure two hotel rooms for my family were repeatedly thwarted at the final confirmation screen – after I’d laboriously entered every detail, tweaked every flight and selected all the non-optional extras – because the rooms we wanted were now inexplicably unavailable. Only when I finally broke and spent 30 minutes hanging on the company’s telephone helpline did a harassed member of staff confess that she had no idea why I couldn’t book them. The computer said ‘no’.