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when did thomas cook go bust

Thomas Cook Group went bust on 23 September 2019, when it entered compulsory liquidation and immediately ceased trading.

Key date and what happened

  • In the early hours of Monday, 23 September 2019, Thomas Cook Group officially filed for compulsory liquidation and collapsed after 178 years in business.
  • Shortly after 02:00 BST, the UK Civil Aviation Authority announced that the company had ceased operations with immediate effect, grounding flights and triggering a large-scale repatriation effort.

Why it was so significant

  • The collapse left around hundreds of thousands of holidaymakers overseas and required what was described as the UK’s largest peacetime repatriation operation.
  • The downfall has been widely discussed as a case of heavy debt, changing travel habits, and intense online competition undermining a historic travel brand.

TL;DR: Thomas Cook “went bust” on 23 September 2019, when it entered liquidation and stopped trading.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.