Poland’s eSky acquires world’s oldest travel brand Thomas Cook

Polish travel group eSky has agreed a deal to buy Thomas Cook, the world’s oldest travel brand, from its current Chinese owner, Fosun, for a reported £30 million (152 million zloty, €35.6 million).

The deal is intended to help the Polish firm, which owns a travel platform that allows comparisons of airline and hotel prices, to strengthen its position in western Europe and increase the flexibility of its product portfolio.

Thomas Cook, a travel company founded in the UK in 1841, fell into insolvency in 2019 after failing to clear a debt burden of £1.1 billion.

The collapse of the travel giant led to chaos in the travel industry and triggered the biggest peacetime repatriation in the UK’s history, as the British government helped organise return trips for more than 150,000 holidaymakers who were stranded abroad.

Chinese multinational conglomerate holding company Fosun acquired the Thomas Cook brand later that year for £11 million. The company’s other assets, such as its stationary sales network and local companies in other countries and hotel brands, were subsequently acquired by a number of investors.

Polish national airline LOT stood to be one of these investors after it signed a deal to buy Condor, Germany’s largest charter airline, which had been part of the British group. LOT, however, pulled out of the deal after the outbreak of the pandemic in early 2020.

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eSky, which now operates in over 50 countries in Europe, the Americas and Africa, announced on Thursday that it had reached an agreement with Fosun to acquire the Thomas Cook brand.

It did not announce the price that it was paying, but Fosun itself say that the deal would total up to £30 million, reported the Financial Times. The deal sees eSky take control of the Thomas Cook brand except for its business in China.

“The synergy of Thomas Cook’s almost two hundred years of brand heritage and experience with eSky’s technology and understanding of the needs of today’s consumers will allow us to strengthen our position in western Europe, as well as increase the flexibility of our offering,” said Łukasz Habaj, eSky’s CEO.

“Thanks to the acquisition, we will become one of the leading companies selling dynamic packages in the UK, which will be an excellent promotion of the Polish business on the international market,” he added.

eSky’s so-called dynamic packages assemble individual trip components (flight ticket, hotel room, insurance, transfers, etc.) into a single offer.

“By offering flexible city break and vacation packages, we want to provide Poles and eSky customers across Europe with a more flexible and competitively priced offer than traditional travel agencies,” said Michał Górecki, senior investment partner at MCI Capital, eSky’s majority shareholder.

“With this acquisition, eSky’s total sales of travel packages are likely to exceed 1 billion zloty (£197 million, €234 million) next year and maintain a three-digit growth rate,” he added.

Finalisation of the transaction is subject to the fulfilment of the UK Civil Aviation Authority’s conditions.

Main image credit: Alan Wilson/Wikimedia Commons (under CC BY-SA 2.0)

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.