British travel giant shuttered, leaving thousands stranded

A 178-year-old U.K. tour company shut down Monday with as many as 150,000 British customers still overseas. In response to Thomas Cook’s closing, the British government kicked off Operation Matterhorn, its biggest peacetime repatriation effort ever, to bring home stranded Britons on chartered airline flights. The company’s closure led to canceled bookings for about 1 million tourists and will leave 21,000 employees around the world out of work.

What happened to the company? In May, Thomas Cook announced it had debts of 1.25 billion pounds. It blamed the declining bookings on uncertainty over Brexit. A smaller-scale repatriation after the collapse of Monarch Airlines in 2017 cost the British government about 60 million pounds.

Dig deeper: Watch Thomas Cook CEO Peter Fankhauser’s statement on the company’s collapse. Read The Guardian’s analysis on the downfall of Thomas Cook.