Thomas Cook have appeared to have made a deal with Easyjet to buy 80,000 seats on Easyjet flights. This is slightly unusual in the fact that the seats are being bought from Easyjet. Holiday companies like Thomas Cook have been buying seats off each other for years and it will continue to happen on certain routes. This was common as some routes do not have the capacity to have more than one flight a week to them so it makes simple commercial sense for firms to share aircraft. Strangely enough in the past it tended to be smaller firms that bought seats off larger however this deal will more than likely make perfect sense when the full details of the deal should it happen are available. Thomas Cook holidays operate a large number of holidays and flights and this proposed deal only accounts for around 3% of its capacity.
It has been publicised that Thomas Cook have financial problems. Thomas Cook have in fact sold some of their aircraft and properties to help reduce its debt. Despite this Thomas Cook has financial guarantees in place at present making them financially secure so avoiding them because you think they may have financial problems at this stage does not make sense.
The biggest problem I see with this flight deal is if you could get an Easyjet flight and access to the same accommodation through another holiday firm or through Easyjet Holidays themselves. If the alternative is cheaper than Thomas Cook who would you book with? Thomas Cook Holidays could be shooting themselves in the foot by making even more people aware that they could save money by getting their own low cost flights and accommodation to create their own holiday.
For now the details of the deal are not known yet so it’s all just speculation. For details of Thomas Cook Holidays (click here) and to access the Thomas Cook flights only web site flythomascook.com (click here)