Interestingly I believe retail director Kathryn Dhabandi was still due to attend the conference! Probably not a good idea given the state of the TC high street when the company went under!

Whenever you accessed Teletext - Ice Lolly etc which is a dumping ground for ''distressed stock'' invariable it was a TC holiday. Yes, filling aircraft, but always at the wrong price.
I know ( knew ) of one TC shop, not in London, where rent and rates alone where in excess of £1m per annum.
When TC debts are eventually realised we are in for one ''helluva'' shock.
The so-called £200m loan to keep trading was nothing more than a pipe dream. Salaries, rents, aircraft leases would wipe this out overnight.
Sadly, TC was a mismanaged embarrassment and better gone now rather than continue to trade and bring more businesses to the brink of bankruptcy i.e. Tunisian hoteliers alone owed in excess of c£70m

Thomas Cook's failure probably had very little to do with the Travel Industry, and certainly not the high street. TUI have a similar number of shops, but a better balance with online and are not crippled by debt. Ultimately, it was far too heavily geared and couldn't repay its borrowings, which is usually the reason most big businesses fail. Their inability to address this issue over the last decade was the main problem. There still remains the question of why they were allowed to continue for so long given the magnitude of their liabilities.

TUI had and have a much better, and importantly differentiated, product. They also embraced online a lot better than TC did.

I'll ask the question again - why did Manny artifically prop up a dying sector by expanding it at the worst possible time to do so?