Passengers Return Home After Thomas Cook Collapse

LONDON — One day after the British tour operator and airline Thomas Cook abruptly collapsed, leaving hundreds of thousands of travelers scrambling to make arrangements, the head of Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority promised that “nobody” from her country would be stranded and subsidiaries in several countries were working to bring people home.

Thomas Cook said on Friday that about 600,000 people were traveling abroad on its services, raising the prospect of hundreds of thousands of travelers stranded overseas after the company collapsed in spectacular fashion, but initial reports suggested that governments and private companies were moving to bring people home were underway.

In addition to the vast repatriation effort in Britain, several companies that are either subsidiaries of Thomas Cook or use the name while running independently of it were still operating and in a position to help passengers home from China, France, Germany, India and the Netherlands.

The repatriation of British travelers was being described as the largest such peacetime effort in the country’s history, and Deidre Hutton, the chairwoman of the Civil Aviation Authority, speaking to the BBC on Tuesday morning, said that around 15,000 people had already been flown back to Britain.

“Nobody is stranded, everybody will get their holiday and they will be brought back at the time they would have come back anyway,” she said. “I’m conscious that we’ve got a huge job to do still, because that’s about 8 percent of the total, but a reasonable start.”

An additional 74 flights were scheduled to bring back another 16,500 people back to Britain on Tuesday, and over the next two weeks, an additional 135,000 passengers will be repatriated, with the effort continuing until Oct. 6. Passengers who are traveling after that date will have to make their own arrangements.

Around 60 percent of the cost for the flights was funded by a government insurance program called the Air Travel Organizer’s License, which means that Thomas Cook customers who booked package travel — generally, some combination of flights, hotels and car rental — are assured of refunds for future canceled trips and for repatriation free of charge.

Customers who bought only flights from Thomas Cook do not have the same protections and may need to rely more on personal travel insurance, if they have it.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain said the government should look into how such situations could be avoided in the future, and seemed to back rules that would turn over responsibility for repatriation to travel companies rather than the government.

“How can we make sure that tour operators take proper precautions with their business models where you don’t end up with a situation where the taxpayer, the state, is having to step in and bring people home?” Mr. Johnson said, according to Reuters.

He voiced his criticism of the company from New York, where he is attending the United Nations General Assembly this week. Speaking at a climate summit on Monday, he asked how business leaders managed to pay themselves large sums as the company went “down the tubes.”

“I think it is a bit bewildering that you can have 160,000 people stranded,” Mr. Johnson said, according to Reuters. “It’s not possible for me to know exactly what happened with the directors of the board of Thomas Cook and how it came about when they paid themselves x, y or z.”

He later tweeted on Monday night that he had met with British Consulate employees in New York who were working to repatriate travelers and thanked the consular workers for their efforts. “It’s a tough time for those who have had holidays disrupted but team hard at work to support them,” he wrote.

The travel company had struggled financially for some time and announced its closing after negotiations to obtain at least 200 million pounds, or $250 million, in additional emergency financing failed over the weekend.

Thomas Cook India posted a statement on its website on Tuesday reassuring customers that it was not part of the British company after being acquired in 2012. The Dutch Thomas Cook subsidiary said it had not yet declared bankruptcy and so was open for business as usual.

A Chinese subsidiary of Thomas Cook, which caters largely to Chinese tourists traveling abroad, said on Monday that its operations would not be affected by the bankruptcy of the parent company.

The subsidiary, Thomas Cook China, said online that it “regretted” the bankruptcy of the British company, and added that Thomas Cook China “has healthy finances, has not been affected by this matter, and all its operations continue as normal.”

The Chinese unit is a Shanghai-based joint venture between the Thomas Cook parent company and a Chinese majority shareholder, Fosun, a corporation that has invested heavily in tourism. Earlier reports said Fosun owned 51 percent of the joint venture, with the other 49 percent in the hands of the Thomas Cook parent company.

As well as operating the joint venture with Thomas Cook, the Fosun Group has been a major shareholder in the now bankrupt British company. In previous months Fosun had proposed a rescue deal that would have given it a 75 percent stake in the tour division of Thomas Cook, but the plan failed to gain enough support from other stakeholders in the company.

Fosun said in a statement to Agence France-Presse that it was “disappointed.” Shares of units of Fosun listed in Hong Kong, Fosun Tourism and Fosun International, have fallen this week, reflecting investor disquiet about damage to the Chinese group’s international ambitions and financial health.