Founder of Package Tours Joins New Wave of Ecological Journeys

Watching a band of Britons chugging Budweisers at Disney World, sipping pina coladas on the beaches of Puerto Rico or slugging down Mekong Whiskeys and cola in Bangkok, it’s hard to believe that the man who made it all possible did so to promote teetotaling. But, in truth,that’s all the ambitious and devout Baptist missionary Thomas Cook had in mind in 1841 when, at the age of 33, he arranged what history records as the world’s first package tour--an 11-mile train excursion from Leicester to Loughborough, where his 570 passenger-patrons attended a big Temperance Society rally.

Just two decades later, after moving thousands of vacationing Britons throughout England, Scotland and Wales, Cook took the great leap across the English Channel, organizing an 1863 trip to the Swiss Alps, pioneering what today is the trillion-dollar industry of international travel.

Today, the package-tour concept remains the backbone of the travel industry, and the corporate tourism empire that the missionary founded remains so much in the industry’s forefront that its name is virtually synonymous with tourism itself.

The Thomas Cook Group, as it is now known, has branches in more than 120 countries throughout the world and owns subsidiary companies in 13 nations as far-flung as Sri Lanka, Egypt and New Zealand. The company that began by selling train seats for a shilling apiece now has assets of nearly $2 billion, and its 1989 sales approached $20 billion.

Cook now lags far behind the mass-travel market leaders in raw numbers of clients, having deliberately bowed out three years ago from the short-haul package-tour industry wars. But, by focusing entirely on long-haul tours and the lucrative traveler’s check market, Cook both revived profits and placed itself in the forefront of what has become one of the world’s most significant and controversial industries.

It is the mass, long-distance movement of tourists that environmentalists and social critics argue has irreparably damaged cultures, crypts, landscapes and other national treasures in lands overly eager to capitalize on the market.

Yet, in keeping with the agency’s pioneering traditions, Cook also claims to be among the few mass-market travel corporations joining the “gentle tourism” revolution, an international movement toward ecologically and culturally sound foreign touring.

“You cannot afford not to be environmentally aware anymore,” said a Cook spokeswoman, adding that the company will soon follow the way of several small, West Coast-based specialized travel agencies and unveil a comprehensive program of gentle tourism that will be incorporated in all of its future package tours.

“It’s increasing awareness, basically,” she said, adding that details of the plan are still being completed. “We’ve been talking to a large number of environmental groups and officials in many of the countries. It’s not really a question of forcing people to do certain things. It’s a question of giving people information.

“But there’s no question this is the way of the future. I don’t know of any major tour operator who is not looking at this area.”

It is an area of physical and cultural tourist pollution that the Thomas Cook agency discovered the hard way.

More than any other agency, Cook pioneered the mass package excursions that ultimately turned much of the Spanish and Greek coasts into concrete wastelands. Cook took a leading role in developing many of those resorts and competed intensively to preserve its share of the business when the market took off during the early and mid-1980s.

Finding itself on the losing end of that war, though, Thomas Cook pulled out in 1987, turning instead to long-distance tour packages to the United States, Asia, the Caribbean and Africa and dropping short-haul European destinations from its catalogues completely.

Not surprisingly, the market soon followed. Most Britons--who form one of the world’s largest tourist populations--tired of the overbuilt and overpopulated tourist traps along the Spanish coast and began hungering for the more distant, more exotic, more pristine.

“Package holiday makers now are more experienced. People’s tastes are changing. They want something different, and Spain, in many ways, has rested on its laurels,” the Cook spokeswoman said, adding that the tourist destruction on the coast hurt the market even more.

Official statistics bear her out. For the first time last year, Florida replaced the Spanish Mediterranean as the No. 1 destination of all Britons touring abroad.

It’s unlikely that the visionary Baptist missionary who started it all ever imagined that tours in his name would, near the end of the 20th Century, leave London almost daily for such faraway destinations as Orlando, Nairobi and Singapore.

Cook clinched his reputation as the world’s greatest early travel agent with a 222-day, round-the-world trip with nine companions more than a century earlier.

He made the journey in 1872--the same year Jules Verne sent Phineas Fogg on his fictional journey “Around the World in 80 Days.”