Mohammad Rishad Faridi, Shaha Faisal, Mohammad Naushad, Saloni Sinha
Thomas Cook Group Plc. (Thomas Cook), a multinational British travel company that arose to global fame, topped among Forbes Fortune 500 list. A company that completely revolutionized the package holiday; operating continuously for 178 years, earned credibility over time. In the early hours of Monday, September 23, 2019 this great global travel group was forced into compulsory liquidation and immediately ceased trading. Taxpayers ended up contributing at least 195 million USD due to its collapse. The British Department for Transportation (DfT) who had engaged in organizing the largest peacetime repatriation since World War two (WW2), agreed to pay an estimated 104 million USD towards the total cost of repatriating the travel giant’s customers (not covered by the -Air Travel Organizers’ License (ATOL) scheme), as well as 150,000 overseas holidaymakers. Other governmental costs included 73 million USD in redundancy and related payments to Thomas Cook’s former employees, and at least 19 million USD in liquidation costs.
The collapse of the 178-year-old Thomas Cook travel giant wreaked chaos making them lose global mistrust, which raised that, raised questions, such as, “how and why it collapsed”. This case study considers the “Gartner Hype Cycle” in order to exploring the yoke and leverage technology that could have prevented Thomas Cook’s catastrophic failure.
This is a first endeavor by the researchers to analyze the failures of Thomas Cook in light of the Gartner Hype Cycle. It can be assumed that Thomas Cook may have averted collapse by adopting technologies suggested by “Gartner Hype Cycle” and bounced back like a Phoenix.