Download - Fly Thomas Cook

Discovering new heights
150 years ago, Thomas Cook led the first-ever package tour to Switzerland.
But did he know that it would help create a package holiday industry for
the masses that’s still going strong nearly two centuries later?
ANNIVERSARY
“HUGE MOUNTAIN
masses rise perpendicularly above
us, whose summits are cushioned
with the greenest verdure
and sprinkled with stray chalets. Surely,
thought we, such grandeur as this cannot be
surpassed!” We’d forgive you for thinking
that it’s a quote straight out of a Dickens
novel. It’s not, but it’s as much a part of
history as one. It’s actually an extract from
the diary of Jemima Morrell, a then
31-year-old Brit, who set out with 62
others on the first package holiday through
Switzerland on 26 June 1863. She was a
part of the Junior United Alpine Club, and
accompanied by Mr Thomas Cook himself
and other pioneers of holidaymaking, they
travelled from Geneva, through the Valais
and the Bernese Oberland to Lucerne, across
lakes and through high-mountain passes.
Even today, such a trip would be quite
an undertaking but back then, with no
trains, roads or cable cars, many doubted it
could be done. But Cook believed that these
dramatic landscapes deserved to be made
available to the ordinary person.
40 THOMAS COOK TRAVEL
THE STUNNING SCENERY OF
THE ALPS STILL CAPTIVATES
TOURISTS TODAY, THANKS
TO THE PIONEERING TOURS
ORGANISED BY THOMAS COOK
(ABOVE LEFT) 150 YEARS AGO
“He enabled a growing middle class
to experience places that had only been
accessible second-hand in newspaper
accounts,” says Greg Witt, whose company
Alpenwild (alpenwild.com) has been offering
similar tours for 30 years. “He was a pioneer,
an innovator and a visionary. And his first
organised tour of Switzerland can rightly
be considered the birth of adventure travel.”
Since then, Thomas Cook as a company
has not only gone on to sell holidays to the
Alpine peaks during the 20th century,
but also helped open up a world of travel to
the masses with package holidays.
For the participants at the time, it was
as much a gruelling experience as it was
awe-inspiring. Unlike today’s chocolate box
chalets and well-kept meadows, the Bernese
Oberland of the 1860s was dishevelled and
wild. Morrell’s diary describes days that
started at 4am and finished late; when men
walked up to 40km up steep slopes, and
women an average of 27km – in full-skirt
dresses that even a seasoned hiker today
would have trouble walking down the street
in, let alone over the icy, rugged paths high
up in the Alps.
A visit to the area nowadays reveals a
different world. Following the route taken
by the party – now recognized as one of
Switzerland’s kulturwege (cultural routes) –
you’ll find a succession of charming, wealthy
villages, where tourism is well-established,
and where roads and single-gauge railways
make it easy for millions of visitors annually
to access the grandeur of the Alps.