Planning your 2025 holiday ?

[turkeyfoot]

Hi
A lot different today

183 years ago - the first package holiday

On July 5th, 1841, Britain's Thomas Cook organized an excursion for workers and their families in England. Tea, ham sandwiches and a brass band were included. It was the birth of mass tourism.
Thomas Cook is regarded as a pioneer of modern tourism.

Within England's class society Cook came from humble beginnings: He was born in 1808 in the small Derbyshire village of Melbourne. His father was a labourer and his mother illiterate. He had to leave school at the age of 10 in order to start earning money.

A few decades later, he was to become England's most successful travel agent. From 1872 onwards, he organized an annual 222-day world tour, covering 40,000 kilometres (24,000 miles).

It all started 175 years ago, on July 5, 1841, when Thomas Cook organized a one-day rail excursion for workers and their families, from Leicester to Loughborough, a mere 11 miles away.

Cook, a former Baptist preacher, believed that most Victorian social problems were related to alcohol and that the lives of working people would be greatly improved if they drank less and became better educated. So his excursion was to offer an alternative pastime to drinking. He chose Loughborough because there was a temperance meeting taking place there on that day.

The ticket, which cost one shilling per person, paid for the rail travel there and back as well as a ham sandwich and a cup of tea. The excursion was accompanied by their very own brass band, which for its time attracted a lot of attention: "People lined the streets, hung out of their windows and stood on rooftops to welcome us and cheer us along the entire route," Thomas Cook later wrote.
Even though this first tour didn't include an overnight stay, it was already a package holiday, says Jürgen Schmude, professor for tourism research at the Ludwig-Maximillian-University in Munich. "This trip to Loughborough was most definitely the forerunner of the modern package holiday,"

Further rail excursions followed and, over time, Cook continued to expand his holiday bases. Starting in 1846, he organized group tours to Scotland, then Ireland and to mainland Europe. In 1866, he added trips to the USA and Canada, then Nile cruises and eventually round-the-world tours.

Geoff