This week...Thomas Cook in trouble, Ryanair annoys online travel agents and consumers flock online for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Last week the travel industry was dominated by news that Thomas Cook was delaying its quarterly reports and seeking emergency funding. The news took to Twitter on Tuesday when the announcement was made and as a result Cook suffered a 30% decrease in UK bookings. The news came as a shock to many as Thomas Cook have been a market leader for over 170 years and, although the issue has been resolved and the public reassured, it has had a big effect on the global brand.

Of course there was other news in both travel and technology last week and as usual we’ve picked out the best industry news for you to catch up on.

CWT Digital News:

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Travel News:

Cook on the mend-25th November- On Friday Thomas Cook announced that it had secured a £200 million loan from its banks which will secure it to next April. Since the announcement that the company was seeking additional funding, shares decreased by up to 75% and the press was speculating that this was the end of Thomas Cook. In a statement on Friday evening Sam Weihagen, Group Interim Chief Executive, assured customers that ‘for over 170 years Thomas Cook has provided customers across the world with fantastic travel experiences. Today they can look forward confidently to holidays with us for many years to come’. Ian Ailles, Chief Executive for mainstream Thomas Cook UK and Ireland even made a dig at Low Cost Holidays’ bidding of ‘Thomas Crooked’ paid ads with ‘Some companies have taken the opportunity to have a cheap dig, it’s not something we would do’. Now that Thomas Cook has financial backing it has to reaffirm customers faith in the brand and the peak booking period in January will reveal if they have achieved this.

Ryanair adds captcha to its site-25th November- In a bid to prevent screen scrapping by third parties, Ryanair has added a captcha screen once a search has been carried out so that prices and availability cannot be accessed. Many dynamic packaging sites use screen scrapping technology to gain access to Ryanair availability and this will in no doubt have an effect on both these sites and Ryanair. It is speculated that Ryanair have implemented this to gauge how much of its business is driven by third parties. Steve Endacott, Chief Executive of the On Holiday Group, spoke out against this move claiming that ‘ I would estimate that 30% of dynamic packaging was based on Ryanair flights and hence the sale of over one million seats on leisure routes has been put at risk’ and that the captcha is ‘likely to annoy its direct customers’. Despite this added security measure, technology experts claim that screen scrapping Ryanair has been made more difficult but not impossible and there maybe a way around it.

Technology News:

Qantas Twitter disaster- 24th November- Last week Qantas learned the hard way that customers are the ones that now have the power. The airline launched a social media competition during a time when the airline had recently been through a strike and received complaints about their service. The Twitter campaign was aimed at promoting the airlines luxury first class product by asking Twitter users to share their dream luxury inflight experience using the hashtag #QantasLuxury. The prize wasn’t even a first class flight it was a set of luxury pyjamas. Floods of negative tweets using the hashtag came in, causing #Qantasluxury to trend for for all the wrong reasons. Having not communicated its recent grounding and recent strike, a competition to win a set of pyjamas clearly wasn’t the way to win back customers trust.

Black Friday turns into Cyber Monday-25th November- Black Friday which was launched back in 2005 caused a huge influx of online bookings in an attempt to win over Christmas shoppers. Companies including Apple, Amazon and Best Buy offered customers discounts on their products during the day, causing the hashtag #BlackFriday to trend worldwide. Today the discounting has extended to Cyber Monday with many companies promoting offers and discounts in order to encourage consumers to part with their money. Both the Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions have spread over Twitter as consumers are becoming more online savy, searching the site for the best discounts.


That’s all from us this week. As you can see it was a busy week and we expect this week will be no different. If you want to keep up with the news during the week, make sure you are following us on Twitter and like us on Facebook.