The dastardly Mr. Deedes's Big shot of the week
Peter Fankhauser’s first job was working as an aerobics instructor. Just imagine: An athletic, strapping youth surrounded each day by perspiring yummy mummies in leotards.
‘And I got paid for it,’ he likes to joke with a wolfish smile.
there may well have been occasions this week when this meaty Swiss sausage gazed out of thomas Cook’s offices overlooking the City of London and reflected upon those sepia-tinged days with a nostalgic sigh.
the 177-year-old travel agent has posted losses of £163m and Herr Fankhauser isn’t happy.
His Mr Whippy-style hair is limp, his dazzlingly white grin gone and his teutonic, ‘I’ll be baaach’ voice even more plodding than usual.
‘It has been a disappointing year,’ he says with understatement.
the travel game is a turbulent business, susceptible to events springing up out of nowhere to trash the balance sheet – 9/11; Sars; the Asian tsunami; the volcanic ash cloud.
THIStime it was the weather’s fault. All that wonderful sunshine we had during the summer meant British holidaymakers opted for Margate over Magaluf.
Can Fankhauser bounce back? turnarounds have been his speciality throughout his career.
After a stint in the Swiss army tank division – he wanted to be a fighter pilot but his father wouldn’t allow it – he gained a management position at travel agent Kuoni.
When he arrived, the company was listing badly. Management consultancy McKinsey had been in, done the rounds and produced one of its customary long-winded reports recommending swingeing job cuts. Fankhauser wasn’t having it. Addressing the company’s 120 shop managers, he brandished a copy of the report over his head and took a match to it.
As the charred pages floated around the room, Kuoni’s foot soldiers whooped with delight. Quite a showman.
Next up, he moved to Dusseldorf to run German tour operator LtU. By 1999, lawyers were recommending he call the insolvency courts. Fankhauser ignored them, fought on and the company was eventually bought by Air Berlin.
He moved to thomas Cook in 2001 to revitalise its German division. His prowess for cost-cutting didn’t go unnoticed by the bosses in London.
In 2011 Harriet Green, thomas Cook’s thrusting chief executive, brought in from the electronics world to breathe new life into the ailing firm, summoned him here to streamline the UK business.
Frenetic Green, famed for her 4am gym workouts, was never in it for the long haul. Part of her motive for moving Fankhauser over to head office was to groom him as her successor.
Not long after the first shoots of her recovery plan began to sprout in 2014, he was announced as the new chief executive.
the new boss was chucked a hospital pass right from the opening whistle.
ONeof Fankhauser’s first jobs was to attend the inquest into the deaths of Christi and Bobby Shepherd, two children killed by carbon monoxide poisoning in 2006 by a faulty boiler in a company-approved Corfu hotel. thomas Cook’s handling of the tragedy had been lamentable. It had refused to apologise, a policy, under the advice of lawyers, Fankhauser continued. the decision to do so, he says, was the biggest mistake of his career.
With three children of his own – two with second wife raffaela – colleagues say the insensitive attitude troubled him deeply.
the following year, Fankhauser shrugged off the lawyers and met the children’s parents, Neil Shepherd and Sharon Wood. they have since set up a charity together – the Safer tourism Foundation.
Fankhauser has overseen further bumps along the way. the terrorism attacks on tunisia, the egypt travel ban. the 29-year veteran of the biz has been there, got the profit warning. His next challenge is getting thomas Cook back in the black.
With High Street travel agents now as dated as Angel Delight, he shut 100 shops last year and we can probably expect further closures next year when he turns things around. Or at least he hopes to turn things around, anyway.
At 58, one suspects Fankhauser’s aerobics teaching days are probably long behind him.