It’s not all outrageous tour reps and beer bellies!

Thomas Cook boss defends package holidays as he launches a boutique hotel to seduce middle classes

HOLIDAYS are supposed to be about balmy beaches, carefree days splashing in the pool and cocktails on warm summer evenings.

But for Peter Fankhauser, the chief executive of tour operator Thomas Cook, it’s all pretty hard work.

every mishap, from the trivial to the tragic, that travellers can conceivably suffer abroad means risk and cost.

The recent spate of terror attacks and the military coup in Turkey have meant he had to change more than 1.2m airline seats, so customers could travel to an alternative destination when their original choice was deemed too risky.

And as seen with the debacle at United Airlines – where a customer was this week dragged off a plane to make room for staff – reputations are easily trashed.

‘I have had 28 years in the industry and never had such a year,’ he says.

All of this comes at a heavy price. Major incidents such as the shooting of 30 British tourists in 2015 in Tunisia by Islamist terrorists knocked around £20m off the bottom line.

The cost of a handover of power in Gambia last year, where there were weeks of tension after the president lost an election, cost ‘single digit millions’.

‘But we still made a profit and we paid a dividend,’ says Fankhauser. ‘That was really an achievement.’

The 56-year-old Swiss executive has a square jaw, a deep Germanic accent and an improbably dark mop of hair. All in all, quite a contrast to his predecessor, harriet Green.

She took over the 176-year- old business when it was on the brink of collapse, and restored its fortunes and its share price, but did seem slightly batty.

Claiming only to need three hours sleep, she prided herself on her gruelling PT sessions in the small hours, perfecting her impressive abdominal muscles and triceps. She once described herself as a ‘landa’ – by which she meant a cross between a roaring lion and a cuddly panda when the need arose to be nice.

Is he a lion or a panda? ‘I am Peter,’ he laughs. ‘I try to be as normal as possible. Of course harriet was a character but I got on with her very well.’

Perhaps he is being diplomatic, as she left him a difficult legacy.

WITHIN months of him taking the top job in late 2014, he found himself dealing with the aftermath of the tragic deaths of seven-year- old Christi Shepherd and her brother Bobby, six. The siblings had died from carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty boiler while on a Thomas Cook holiday in Corfu in 2006 with their father Neil.

For almost a decade the company had refused to accept responsibility and had even received a compensation payout of more than £3m from the company that owned the hotel – slammed at the time by critics as ‘blood money’.

In 2015, after an inquest in Wakefield ruled that Thomas Cook had breached its duty of care to the family, Fankhauser stopped listening to his company lawyers and finally apologised to the family.

emotion is etched on his face as he admits he was ‘ashamed’ of how it had behaved. his own rank and file staff, he admits, were ashamed of their employer.

he realised Thomas Cook had conducted itself in a heartless way, and risked permanently forfeiting the trust of its customers.

‘If we went on like before we would not have existed in a few years’ time,’ he says. ‘It is about being a human being. We had to learn some hard lessons. We were not following our heart.

‘I said, “here I stop, I want to talk to the family”.’ Now, he says, he has a good relationship with the children’s mother, Sharon Wood, and father, Neil Shepherd.

As part of his efforts to make amends, he set up a charity, the Safer Tourism Foundation, with Wood. ‘I feel now looking back that we did something good out of it, the foundation. It was a turning point for the whole company.’

Thomas Cook also has a special crisis unit at its headquarters on the outskirts of Peterborough.

Large world maps are displayed on the walls and TV news streams out from large screens, so the small team are aware of any emergencies around the world.

Their job is to extricate customers from trouble spots and to help people who have been through a traumatic experience on holiday, whether that is illness, sexual assault or a bereavement.

At peak times, the unit will be dealing with 70-80 cases – a tiny proportion of customers.

The unit works with the Centre for Crisis Psychology, an independ- ent company that has provided support in disasters for more than 20 years. Customers are offered help for as long as they want it.

But the venerable travel company and its customers also face more mundane problems, such as the recent weakness of the pound, which might put a squeeze on family budgets and force them to cut back on holidays.

SO FANKHAUSER has poured resources into ensuring value for money, including more all-inclusive deals so there are no worries about expenses at a destination.

he’s sped up complaints, so most gripes are resolved within ten days, compared with a stonking 35 days a couple of years ago.

The number of hotels has been cut from 10,000 to around 3,000 to keep a tighter rein on quality and service. And a special ‘ customer experience’ squad collects feedback about the hotel, food, entertainment and reps – apparently Brits want more jacket potatoes when abroad because many are on the Slimming World diet.

The result is that up to 40pc of his clientele are repeat customers and says bookings are up around 10pc for the summer.

The vexed question of snobbery still hangs in the air, though.

A century ago, any kind of travel was glamorous. Traditional package deals had their glory days in the 1970s but now they have a retro air, like seaside postcards and holiday camps.

Many middle class families have been seduced by cheap flights and hotels on the internet, and in any case consider themselves far too sophisticated to be seen with a tour rep and a bunch of Brits baring their lobster-pink beer bellies.

It’s not like that, says Fankhauser. One of his innovations is ‘ Casa Cook’, a new boutique hotel on the Greek island of Rhodes.

Casa Cook is chic, but relatively cheap – from around £90 a night for a standard double room.

On a pay package of £1.2m last year, he could afford to stay in the world’s most luxurious hotels, but claims he’s partial to a Thomas Cook package himself.

‘Of course,’ he says. ‘ Probably my favourite destination is Turkey. They are such nice people.’

So if a tall Swiss has plonked his towel on your sun lounger, it just might be the boss.