Thomas Cook collapsed overnight, and the state had to fly its customers home

Thomas Cook, founded in 1841, was the world's oldest travel company — the firm that invented the package holiday. By 2019 it was a sprawling, debt-laden business, weighed down by about £1.7 billion of debt, a heavy burden of high-street travel shops, and years of weak profits in a tough, competitive industry disrupted by online booking.

The company had been struggling for years, and in 2019 it was running out of cash. It negotiated a rescue deal with its Chinese shareholder Fosun and its banks, but needed an extra £200 million to see it through the winter. When last-ditch talks to find that money failed, Thomas Cook ran out of options.

Thomas Cook stopped trading at about 2am on 23 September 2019 and went into compulsory liquidation, 22,000 jobs going with it. Roughly 600,000 customers were travelling worldwide; the part the British state had to solve was the 150,000-plus UK holidaymakers booked to fly home over the following fortnight. The Civil Aviation Authority chartered 150 aircraft from 50 partners and brought about 140,000 of them back — the largest peacetime repatriation in British history, and about twice the size of the Monarch operation it was modelled on.