Tourism in Wartime Britain 1914–18: Adaptation, Innovation and the Role of Thomas Cook & Sons

After reading this chapter you should be able to: Understand the role of crisis in the business environment and how one large entrepreneurial and international company, Thomas Cook & Sons Ltd, responded to a major crisis – the First World War; Outline the challenges posed by operating in a wartime setting, where travel is not able to operate in a free market setting and with government intervention a dominant feature to meet national wartime efficiency objectives; Explain the types of evidence and research methods used by business historians and historians of tourism to reconstruct the way in which entrepreneurial businesses adapted and operated in wartime conditions; Appreciate the problems of having partial and incomplete evidence in reconstructing tourism patterns and activities; Illustrate how to use specific sources of historical data, such as newspapers, to challenge conventional interpretations of how tourism was impacted by war.