What do you do to stop people from drinking to much alcohol? Get them to travel, of course. Witness the birth of the travel agency.
Dave Young:
Welcome to The Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not so secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector, and storyteller. I’m Stephen’s sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it’s us, but we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients. So here’s one of those.
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Dave Young:
Welcome back to The Empire Builders Podcast, Dave Young here with Stephen Semple. And you’ve got me stumped on today’s topic, Stephen, right?
Stephen Semple:
It doesn’t happen very often.
Dave Young:
And it either means that you’re finding nuggets that nobody’s ever found or we’ve hit the bottom of the barrel, but I don’t think we’ve hit that. You said, “This is Thomas Cook Travel,” and you thought I might have heard of it, but you failed to understand that I spent my formative years in Western Nebraska where there was no travel agent. There was no travel. In fact, tomorrow Julie and I will have been married 20, no, excuse me, 31 years.
Stephen Semple:
Wow.
Dave Young:
And our first date, we drove a hundred miles to go to a Starbucks, Baskin-Robbins and a Taco Bell. So, travel agent, where? What?
Stephen Semple:
Your travel agent was your gas station.
Dave Young:
I’ve heard of such things. So do tell me more about this Thomas Cook fellow.
Stephen Semple:
Well, they existed for 178 years until going defunct in 2019 so they were around a long time. And it was founded by Thomas Cook on July 5th, 1841 in Leicester, England. And it was a pioneer in the travel space. That’s what makes it interesting. Thomas Cook created the idea of middle-class travel, group travel, and the travel agency. They created that. He really was the first. Thomas Cook was a Baptist minister from the Midlands of England and one day while waiting for a stagecoach he conceived the idea that travel, and specifically the educational benefits of travel, could help working people be weaned off the fiend of alcohol, as he put it.
Dave Young:
I mean, these days you travel to go find places to get alcohol.
Stephen Semple:
Well, I know, it seems odd, doesn’t it? He was quoted as saying, “What a glorious thing that it would be if the newly developed power of railways and locomotion could be subservient to the cause of the Temperance Movement.” It started his thinking around it because on July 5th, 1841 Cook arranged for a train to carry 570 temperance supporters 11 miles from Leicester to Loughborough and back for a shilling. And the price included tickets and food, all-inclusive.
So over the next three summers Cook created more and more outings for temperance groups and Sunday school children, and it became so successful that the Midlands County Railway Company offered Cook an arrangement as long as he provided passengers.
Dave Young:
Cool.
Stephen Semple:
So Cook started a business under his name that organized rail excursions for pleasure, and he took a percentage of the revenue so basically became the world’s first travel agent.
Dave Young:
Yeah.
Stephen Semple:
He also took this step further. He created first class and second class tickets.
Dave Young:
Oh, there you go.
Stephen Semple:
So here’s the other thing he realized is, travel, in that day, people weren’t traveling. So to stimulate travel, what did you have to do? He created a 60-page handbook on journeys. This was the first travel brochure. So people are starting to travel, “Well, I got to stimulate the travel, so I need to create a travel brochure.” He began advertising the idea of travel, and he’s quoted as saying, “Advertising is to trade what steam is to machinery.” It’s the thing that makes it work, right?
Dave Young:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Stephen Semple:
His goals, he wanted to make travel cheap and easy and safe for others. He would organize all sorts of trips around the area. And he started then also including accommodation in the tours. In 1846, he created a tour for 360 people to tour Scotland. That led to ruin and bankruptcy. But he kept at it. And five years later there was the Great Exhibition, which was held at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park in London, one of these big, world trade type things. It was really-
Dave Young:
It was built for the World Expo or whatever it was.
Stephen Semple:
It was the first World’s Fair. Yeah.
Dave Young:
Prince Albert.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah, Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, was the organizer for it. So it was a big deal. Big, big deal. And so Cook created a tour from the Midlands to London, and he managed to do this tour, think about this at the time, 1851, and he had 165,000 people sign up for this tour.
Dave Young:
Holy moly.
Stephen Semple:
And he included dormitories in this trip for an extra two shillings a night. And then, in 1855, he did his first continental tour, right?
Dave Young:
All right.
Stephen Semple:
So taking people from the island over to continental Europe, and they had paddle steamers to Antwerp, and then on to Brussels and Cologne and Frankfurt and Heidelberg and Strasbourg, and finally to Paris for the International Exhibition. And he personally conducted this tour. Then he created tours of Egypt and the Nile River along with Palestine. The Nile River tours were so popular that at one point the Nile got the nickname Cook’s Canal.
Dave Young:
Love that.
Stephen Semple:
And Cook and his wife also operated a small temperance hotel above the office, and also sold luggage and footwear and telescopes and guidebooks. They also sold hotel coupons which were really the early forms of traveler’s checks that could be used at approved locations. So instead of traveling with money you would travel with these coupons for your hotel.
Dave Young:
You wouldn’t need to have a lot of cash on you because-
Stephen Semple:
Right. World’s first traveler’s check. So the amazing thing is these tours were for this newly emerging middle-class worker, not the rich. This is one of the things he also noticed was, the beginning of the industrial revolution, you suddenly had this emergence of the middle class where people had a little bit of extra money and he created tours for these people. Travel was new to this group. Things like the Great Exposition, which exposed people to the empire, also stirred the idea of travel and Cook facilitated this.
1866, he led his first tour to the United States which included a month-long voyage across the Atlantic. You’re going to love this one. In 1872, they did a world tour, 222-day excursion that included a steamship across the Atlantic, stagecoach across America, paddle steamer to Japan, overland journey across India and China. It was 210 guinea, which would be about $35,000 today.
Dave Young:
Wow. What an adventure.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah. And his sons, later, actually created the true version of the traveler’s check that was actually more like money rather than just a hotel. More like the traveler’s check that we became accustomed to, that no one knows what the hell a traveler’s check is any longer. So for the kids out there, a traveler’s check… Anyway, you can go look it up.
Dave Young:
Just any check, right, traveler’s or not.
Stephen Semple:
I don’t even know whether I can explain what a traveler’s check is any longer why you would need it.
Dave Young:
Right.
Stephen Semple:
He was taking so many people through Europe that there was complaints from the well-heeled that they felt that Europe was supposed to be their private domain and Cook swamped the continent with these low-bred, vulgar, ridiculous people.
Dave Young:
Oh, no.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah. And Cook’s tourists were being referred to as Cockneys.
Dave Young:
Oh, that’s great.
Stephen Semple:
He also set up a division for the well-to-do called the Princes’ Department and it did tours for people like Indian maharajas. There was one tour I came across that included 200 servants, 50 families, 20 chefs, 10 elephants, 35 tame tigers, a thousand packing cases, and a howitzer.
Dave Young:
And a howitzer. Why not?
Stephen Semple:
A howitzer, why not? When the sons took over the organization they did the first air charter in 1919, that went from New York to Chicago. And in 1928 the business was sold, but it forever changed travel.
Dave Young:
Stay tuned. We’re going to wrap up this story and tell you how to apply this lesson to your business right after this.
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Dave Young:
Let’s pick up our story where we left off. And trust me, you haven’t missed a thing.
Stephen Semple:
This was at the time of the emergence of the middle class and the part that I really liked about what Thomas Cook did, it’s really more about, yeah, there’s the big idea of there’s this new idea, travel, to the middle class and advertising it. What he recognized, you and I talk about this a lot, is friction. What he recognized was all the friction points. “Okay, where do I travel to?” Travel brochure. “What about money?” Here’s vouchers and coupons. Right? All-inclusive, these package travels. So basically he went through and, every friction point there was, created a solution for those friction points.
Dave Young:
There’s still, to this day, for a lot of people, something that can be a little unnerving of landing in a city you’ve never been in and not have some kind of plan, right?
Stephen Semple:
Yes.
Dave Young:
Even with the internet, you book a room in downtown somewhere and now you’re like, “Well, what am I going to do next?”
Stephen Semple:
And, you think about it, this is at a time where no internet, no travel brochures, no any of those things. People didn’t have cars. People barely traveled at all. So it was very, very innovative and there’d be a lot of scary pieces to it that they just basically helped remove each one of those roadblocks.
Dave Young:
As the industrial revolution rolled in, to become the person that helps people, even though this is sort of a pun, navigate the new technology, steamships, railroads. Even 50 years before him, you want to go some place beyond your own horizon, probably didn’t happen very often.
Stephen Semple:
Really didn’t, really didn’t at all.
Dave Young:
If you’re not landed gentry or wealthy, you just didn’t go anywhere.
Stephen Semple:
What was really interesting is he even created the thought that travel is a good thing to do, to expand your horizons, your mind, all those other things. So I do find it funny that it was for the purpose of temperance, I found that a really interesting leap.
Dave Young:
Yeah. I think he would’ve been successful anyway. That’s probably just an interesting personal goal of his, and we see that all the time as well. I’ve got a client that, embedded in all of their ads, are their beliefs. That’s not completely unusual. I don’t know that it worked, right, I don’t know if we have evidence of that. If you’re trying to get away from your pub you’re going to have to go somewhere where there isn’t a pub, and I don’t know where that would be.
Stephen Semple:
Right. Well, and the interesting one than that is, even, what we discovered for the Vice Media. In terms of the founder of Vice Media, he was a heroin addict who went to a little, tiny town in the middle of Europe to get away from heroin, and he was able to find it. So there is that, but here’s the interesting thing. The reputation of Thomas Cook Travel was such that unchaperoned single women went on tours with Thomas Cook. So I don’t know what they did, but there was that reputation that it was okay to send your unattached daughter on one of these trips unchaperoned.
Dave Young:
You got my attention, though, with the trip to Scotland that bankrupted him. Was that early on?
Stephen Semple:
That was early, yeah. That was early on. I was not able to come across the details of what went wrong that bankrupted him on that trip.
Dave Young:
There’s something in the back of my head says maybe they got involved in some distilleries.
Stephen Semple:
Well, maybe, who knows? Maybe that’s the reason why we can’t find any of the details on it, it’s deeply buried.
Dave Young:
Exactly. All of his passengers jumped off the train and founded distilleries.
Stephen Semple:
They never came back.
Dave Young:
No, they’re Scottish now.
Stephen Semple:
Maybe that’s what happened. I just thought it was an interesting story, especially in terms of this whole idea of looking at friction points and eliminating those friction points so that basically the product you’re selling, the service you’re selling, is just continually easier for the customer. And, I think, far too often we don’t think about this constant elimination of all of these things. Make it easier. Make it easier. Make it easier.
Dave Young:
And it lasted till 2019, you said?
Stephen Semple:
Existed for 178 years.
Dave Young:
Sounds like maybe the pandemic taken them out.
Stephen Semple:
No, because September 2019, I think just-
Dave Young:
Just before.
Stephen Semple:
Just before. And it was purchased by Hays Travel, that’s who purchased it, but it went defunct in 2019.
Dave Young:
Thank you for sharing the Thomas Cook story, Stephen. Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us, subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a big, fat, juicy five-star rating and review. And if you have any questions about this or any other podcast episode, email to [email protected].
