Package holidays explained in 60 seconds

In this series, The Week looks at the ideas and innovations that permanently changed the way we see the world.

Package holidays in 60 seconds

A package holiday is a trip in which transport and accommodation are advertised and sold together by a tour operator or travel agent. Other elements of the holiday may also be included in the cost, such as a rental car or activities during the trip.

Package holidays are organised by a tour operator and sold to customers, often via a travel agent. In some cases, the travel agents are employees of the tour operator and sell only their products, while other travel agents are independent and sell a range of products from a number of operators.

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British travel business Thomas Cook was one of the world's first package holiday vendors, and developed into a tour operator and airline. It collapsed in September 2019, triggering the biggest ever peacetime repatriation to bring back 150,000 UK holidaymakers, before relaunching as an online-only firm the following year.

How did it develop?

Thomas Cook began offering "tours" of sorts in 1841, when the businessman who would lend the company his name chartered a train to take a group of temperance campaigners 11 miles from Leicester to a rally in Loughborough.

Having organised this first trip, Cook then expanded to foreign breaks, taking his first parties to Belgium, Germany and France in 1855.

Cook's trips became increasingly ambitious, culminating in 1872 in a 222-day tour to Egypt, via the US, Japan, China, Singapore and India. The journey covered more than 25,000 miles and cost 200 guineas (£210), reported The Guardian.

Cook then launched the "circular note" in 1875. A forerunner of the traveller's cheque, the note was a document request by a bank that meant linked foreign banks would pay out money to a named traveller.

By the turn of the century, the first commercially organised British ski trips were heading for the Alps. The Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle chose the Reichenbach Falls above the Swiss mountain resort of Meiringen as a location in his 1893 novel "The Final Problem", said History Extra, "reflecting the growing popularity of walking holidays at that time".

The two world wars largely brought foreign travel to a halt, but in 1949 Horizon Holidays – fronted by Russian-born British entrepreneur Vladimir Raitz – launched, organising trips, with flights included, to Corsica. The journey time to the mountainous Mediterranean island was a mere six hours by Douglas DC-3 aircraft, a huge reduction on the 48-hour journey by rail and sea that it replaced.

The launch of Horizon pre-empted a boom in foreign holidays, with The Guardian reporting that in 1950 one million Brits headed overseas, while in 1954 changes to the Convention on International Civil Aviation resulted in a surge in mass tourism using charter planes. By 1994, Brits were taking 27 million holidays, 56% of them package holidays.

In Mediterranean countries, hotel construction developed rapidly during the 1960s, with History Extra noting that Spanish fascist dictator General Franco particularly "saw tourism as a way of enriching a 'backward' nation".

While Brits were the earliest adopters of the package tour, the Chinese have since overtaken them. Revenue in the package holidays market is expected to reach nearly $50 billion in 2023, with China generating more than any other country, according to Statista.

How did it change the world?

The package holiday saw a "broadening of the British mind", said The Independent's Adam Lusher, allowing more tourists to experience foreign cultures. Modern British plumbing also "owes much to the package holiday", with tourists discovering the attraction of showers and bidets. 

But with the possibilities afforded by cheap travel came the problems of overtourism. The number of international tourist arrivals has gone from 25 million a year in 1950 to a predicted 1.8 billion a year in 2030, according to the World Tourism Organization. "Fed up with housing shortages, traffic, noise, pollution and litter, many popular destinations in Europe are swapping their 'come-to-us' tourism campaigns for 'please-don't' anti-tourism strategies," noted Forbes.

In his 2001 book "Flight to the sun: the story of the holiday revolution", Horizon founder Raitz wrote that Tossa de Mar, Horizon's first Costa Brava resort, was once a "fishing village with half a dozen tiny hotels, a couple of bars and nothing else". But through his package tours, he wrote, "Beautiful sites along the rugged coast were spoiled forever."