The German and British operators

The argument

Thomas Cook had a German twin, and almost nobody in hospitality has heard of him. Carl Stangen opened his Reise-Bureau in Berlin in 1868, five years after his elder brother Louis opened Germany's first travel bureau in Breslau in 1863. He ran conducted parties to Rome and Palestine, published guidebooks and a travel paper, sent an eight-month world tour round the earth in 1878, took Germans to the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, and chartered two Austrian Lloyd steamers for his 185th Orient journey in 1898. [1][2][3] The epithet der deutsche Thomas Cook is not a modern piece of marketing; the tourism literature traces it to an essay of 1958. [3]

What matters here is not the symmetry but what happened after it. Both national lines ended in a sale, and only one of them left behind an institution. The British firms died as firms and survived as names — Gaze bankrupt in 1903, Dean & Dawson absorbed by Cook, Lunn and the Polytechnic merged into Lunn Poly and retired by a German company in 2004, Thomson retired by the same company in 2017, Thomas Cook liquidated in 2019. The German firms died as firms too — Stangen sold to Hapag in 1904 or 1905 — but what they built instead was a company for carrying the risk of an unsold seat, and that company now owns the British names.

For a register of hospitality the consequence is specific and uncomfortable. The tour operator is the first institution that bought capacity before it was sold, which is the entire economics of a hotel bed. And the register cannot tell you when that began. The date on which German or British operators started contracting hotel beds in blocks is not established by any source read here; the earliest corporate function anyone names is TUI's own, in 1997. [4]

1 · Breslau 1863, Berlin 1868

The Deutsches Historisches Museum dates the first German travel bureau plainly: 1863: In Breslau eröffnet das erste Reisebüro Deutschlands. [5] It does not name the owner. The attribution to Louis Stangen (1828–1876), who ran special and society trips from Breslau and brought his brother in, is carried by the Stangen literature and by the standing academic monograph on the family, which credits Louis with the idea of founding a travel bureau at all. [1][3]

Carl Stangen (1833–1911) moved to Berlin in 1867 and from November 1868 traded under his own name. [1] His address is already disputed: the firm's biography says Mohrenstraße 10, and the obituary printed in the Karlsruher Tagblatt four days after his death says Markgrafenstraße. [1][2] The register prints both and names each.

The agency's own corporate history exists — Entstehung und Entwickelung von Carl Stangen's Reise Bureau, seventy-two pages, printed in Berlin around 1900 and covering 1868 to 1899 — and it is digitised at the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin. [6] This chapter has not read it. Its text layer did not return through the tools used here, and the figure most often quoted for the firm — 686 trips between 1868 and 1899 — rests on secondary repetition that the firm's own book would settle. [1][6] A number that can be checked and has not been is recorded here as a number that can be checked and has not been.

2 · What Stangen sold

The pattern is Cook's and the dates are his own. A large party to Rome in early 1870, with an audience with Pius IX; parties to Palestine in the early 1870s, for which the cartographer Heinrich Kiepert supplied survey instruments in 1874. [2] An Egypt trip — the obituary places one at the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the later chronology gives 1873, and both stand here. [2][1] Guides to Palestine and Syria in 1877 and 1893, to Egypt in 1882 and 1893. [1] A world tour offered in 1878 and run over eight months in 1878–79 with eight travellers, which the tourism historian Hasso Spode dates as the first, and which Stangen wrote up himself in 1880 as Eine Reise um die Erde. [1][3]

Two of his journeys belong in a hospitality register rather than a tourism one.

In 1893 the firm ran an eighty-four-day package across North America for the Chicago World's Fair, out of Bremerhaven on the Norddeutscher Lloyd steamer Saale — the German Emigration Center, which holds the photographs, calls it the first German package tour to the New World. [7] The outbound carrier was a liner, the inbound product was a fixed-price itinerary, and the two were sold as one thing.

In 1898 Stangen chartered the SS Bohemia and SS Thalia from Österreichischer Lloyd for a thirty-four-day Orient journey leaving Trieste on 8 October, timed so that his party attended the opening of the Church of the Redeemer in Jerusalem during Wilhelm II's Levant voyage. The booklet he printed for it was titled Orient-Sonderfahrt (185. Orient-Reise) — the firm numbered its journeys, and this was the hundred-and-eighty-fifth. [1] A tour operator chartering two ships is an operator taking the risk that he will not fill them, and that is twenty years before the Mitteleuropäisches Reisebüro existed and half a century before the charter aircraft.

3 · 1879: the coupon war, in print

The best single piece of evidence about the British trade at its height is a reference book, not an archive. Under Tourist Agencies, Dickens's Dictionary of London for 1879 names exactly two firms: Cook & Son, "the original firm in this business," which "for a time held nearly all the trade," and Gaze & Son, which "shared the business" and was "less widely known." [8]

Then it prints the terms, and they are the terms of a hospitality contract.

Fares between the two differed by a penny or a shilling. [8] The competition was not in the transport. It was in what the paper entitled you to at the hotel door, and in whether you had to buy the firm's travel to get it. Gaze charged sixpence more, fed you twice and sold to the public; Cook tied the coupon to the ticket. That is a distribution strategy, printed in a London directory in 1879, and it is the same argument the trade is still having.

4 · What 1844 actually was

Henry Gaze is routinely given a founding date of 1844. The Southampton record, footnoted to dated newspaper issues, says what he founded that year: a boot and shoemaker's shop at 164 High Street, Southampton, first advertised in the Hampshire Advertiser of 16 November 1844. He was appointed bootmaker to Queen Victoria on 26 July 1850 and to Napoleon III on 2 June 1855. [9]

The travel business has its own dates and they are later. Costed itineraries came first as books — Switzerland: how to see it for ten guineas in 1861, Paris: how to see it for five guineas in 1863 — and the first conducted excursions ran on 29 September and 2 October 1865, Exeter to Paris by way of Southampton. [9] A handbill the Science Museum holds, advertising the firm's "Sixteenth Season" of Paris trips in March 1880, counts back to exactly that year — an inference, not a museum statement, but a clean one. [10] The ten-week Egypt and Holy Land tour left Southampton on 6 February 1868; the London office opened at 163 Strand in June 1869; the sons became partners in 1872 and 1891; the business ended in bankruptcy in 1903. [9]

The rest of the British field, with what is actually dated:

— Dean & Dawson, founded 1871 at Stockport by Joseph Dean; in 1890 Dean started a printing company to serve the agency; Thomas Cook eventually took the travel business over, and the year of that takeover is not established by any source read. The printer outlived the agency and trades today as Deanprint. [11]

— The Polytechnic Touring Association, which grew out of holidays arranged for Quintin Hogg's Regent Street Polytechnic: member trips to Switzerland and Boulogne in 1886, schoolboys to Belgium and Switzerland in 1888, the Paris Exhibition in 1889, cruises to Norway from 1892, the Lake Lucerne chalets acquired by Robert Mitchell in 1893 or 1894 — the University of Westminster's own fonds description and the secondary account disagree by a year — the name in use from about 1900, and an independent company from 1911. [12][13]

— Sir Henry Lunn, whose Grindelwald reunion conferences ran annually from 1892 to 1896 and whose travel business dates run Co-operative Educational Tours 1893, the first inclusive tours to Adelboden and Wengen 1902, the Public Schools Alpine Sports Club 1905, the Hellenic Travellers Club 1906 with Lord Bryce, Alpine Sports Limited 1908. [14] ⚑ These dates come from a secondary article that itself cites the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; the ODNB entry is the citation this register should carry when it writes him, and it has not been read here.

— The Workers' Travel Association, founded at a meeting at Toynbee Hall in November 1921 to put international travel within reach of working people, running a single-class-fare cruise on the Esperance Bay in 1932 and chartering transport in 1938 to bring socialists and trade unionists out of Czechoslovakia. [15]

— Frames. A name in every account of the British trade and not a single sourced date. The Bodleian holds its brochures in a sequence spanning 1875 to 1945 and gives no per-operator dates; the "1881" in circulation appears only on unsourced pages. [16] It is left out of this register rather than admitted on a rumour.

— And outside Britain, the same decade: Thomas Bennett, a Norwegian-British priest, opened a travel agency in Christiania in 1850, which acquired branches and agents across much of the world. [17]

5 · Both lines end in a sale

Stangen sold to the Hamburg America Line. The year is disputed between the two best sources: the 1911 obituary says he withdrew from the business in 1904, leaving his two sons running the bureau under Hapag; the later account says early 1905, with the firm renamed Reisebüro der Hamburg-Amerika Linie, merged into Hapag's existing agency and moved to Unter den Linden. [2][1] Hapag's own corporate publication confirms that it acquired "Carl Stangen's Reisebureau," calls it Germany's oldest and largest travel agency, and gives no year at all. [18]

That acquisition is the hinge of the German story. Albert Ballin had already launched a seaside-resort business in 1889 and sent the Augusta Victoria on her pleasure cruise in 1891; Hapag would be exclusive seller of Zeppelin tickets by 1910 and a co-founder of a Lufthansa predecessor in 1917. [18] Buying Stangen put the oldest travel agency in Germany inside a shipping line. The agency stopped being a business and became a department — and the German trade has been organised that way, operator and carrier in one company, ever since.

Norddeutscher Lloyd, founded at Bremen in 1856, added pleasure trips to its programme in 1908 and merged into Hapag-Lloyd in 1970, Bremen keeping the tourism sector. [19] The Mitteleuropäisches Reisebüro — the DER of today — was founded in 1918, and the contemporary company register records Mitropa handing its German ticket sales to it. [20][21]

And the other half of the German contribution was never a firm at all. Karl Baedeker founded his house at Koblenz in 1827, bought the rights to Klein's Rheinreise in 1828, and by his death in 1859 had guides to the Rhineland, Belgium, Holland, Paris, Germany and Austria. [22] The museum dates the first Handbuch für Reisende to 1842. [5] The dates are reconcilable — the firm, the first book, the series — and the register should not collapse them into one.

6 · The invention that was German

The British operators invented the conducted party and the coupon. The Germans, two generations later, invented something a hotel should care about more: a company whose purpose is to carry the risk of empty capacity.

The sequence is dated and it is short. Dr. Tigges-Fahrten was founded at Wuppertal in 1928 by Hubert and Maria Tigges, and took Germans to a then-untouched Mallorca in 1934. [4] DER-Gesellschaftsreisen, founded 1948, became Touropa in 1951. Scharnow-Reisen and Hummel Reisen were both founded at Hannover in 1953 — the same year Tigges first offered flights to Mallorca. [4] Then the two decisive ones:

— 1956 — Scharnow and Hummel formed a joint venture expressly to carry the higher costs and risks of air travel. [4]

— 1957 — Touropa, Scharnow and Hummel issued Germany's first air-travel catalogue together, as Deutsche Flugtouristik. [4]

Risk pooled first, catalogue second, merger third: on 1 December 1968 the four — Touropa, Scharnow, Hummel and Tigges — signed the agreement that formed Touristik Union International at Hannover. [4] TUI's own history page confirms the month and year and names none of the four, and carries no other date at all. [23] A company that cannot date its own history is a company whose history someone else will write.

Preussag took control through Hapag-Lloyd across 1997–2000, formed a tourism holding in 2000, and renamed itself TUI AG in 2002 — a decision its chief executive announced at a results conference in Hanover on 25 April 2002, though the effective date of the change is not established here. [4][24][25]

7 · Who owns the names now

The British answer is short, and it is the chapter's point.

Every British name in this trade is now either extinct or was retired by a German company. ⚑ And the merger dates themselves are not agreed: Lunn Poly's formation is given as 1965 by one account, "the 1960s" by the University of Westminster's own archival note, and "a few years after 1962" by a third. [29][12][13] Three accounts, no date.

8 · The question this chapter cannot answer

When did tour operators begin buying hotel beds in blocks?

This is the question that would matter most to a register of hospitality, because it is the moment the hotel stopped selling its own rooms. It is not established. Searched in English and German — allotments, Bettenkontingente, bed banks, Vorauskauf, Touropa and Mallorca in the 1950s — and what comes back is vendor explainers with no history and course notes with no sources. An open-access academic chapter on the invention of Mediterranean mass tourism mentions Touropa, Scharnow and TUI not once. [31]

What can be dated is the shape of the answer, and it is assembled here so that whoever closes the gap starts from evidence rather than from a story:

— 1898 — Stangen charters two Austrian Lloyd steamers for a single journey. [1]

— 1950 — Raitz's Corsica package is a surplus Dakota plus the camping grounds of the Club Franco-Britannique: charter aircraft and contracted accommodation, but the accommodation is tents. [26][27]

— 1956 — two German operators pool the cost and risk of air travel in a joint venture. [4]

— 1971 — British operators are first permitted to sell a package below the normal scheduled fare on a route. [26]

— 1997 — TUI's restructuring creates a division for the purchasing of hotel capacities, the only time any source read here names block hotel buying as a corporate function. [4]

The honest reading is that charter risk came first by decades and that hotel-capacity risk followed, but the register does not know the year, and says so.

⚑ One correction this chapter makes to another. The register's chapter on the first travel agents records that Henry Gaze's 1844 date "is not established." It can now be stated precisely: 1844 is established, and it is a shoemaker's. [9]

9 · What the register holds, and what it does not

Part IX holds Thomas Cook and John Mason Cook, LHL-P-552 and LHL-P-566; Georges Nagelmackers, LHL-P-055; Albert Ballin, LHL-P-379, whose line stands at LHL-320. Part I holds Belmond, LHL-014, which carries what is left of the Orient Express rolling stock, and Part VI the trains themselves.

It holds nobody and nothing from this chapter's German half. No Carl Stangen, no Louis Stangen, no Baedeker, no Hapag travel bureau, no TUI. On the British side it holds no Gaze, no Dean & Dawson, no Lunn, no Polytechnic Touring Association, no Workers' Travel Association, no Horizon, no Thomson.

That is defensible for a register of luxury hospitality only if the operator is held to be outside the subject. This chapter is the argument that it is not: the firm that contracts a hotel's beds a year before anyone sleeps in them is part of the hospitality business, whatever it calls itself, and the largest of them owns brands this register already records. When those rows are written, two cautions from this research go with them. Stangen's own company history is digitised and unread, so his trip counts and branch list should come from it and not from repetition. And TUI's own site carries no date but 1968, so every other TUI date in the register must name the outside source it came from.