History of package holidays.

In the early days of flight, going away to your favourite destination was a luxry only for the rich. But with the arrival of package holidays/budget airlines - it became open to the masses.
An early form of package holiday was organised by Thomas Cook in 1841, offering customers a return trip between Leicester and Loughborough. The first package tour of Europe was organised by Cook in 1855, and by 1872 he was undertaking world-wide tours, albeit with small groups.


Vladimir Raitz, the co-founder of the Horizon Holiday Group, pioneered the first mass package holidays abroad with charter flights between Gatwick airport and Corsica in 1950, and organised the first package holiday to Palma in 1952, Lourdes in 1953, and the Costa Brava and Sardinia in 1954. In addition, the amendments made in Montreal to the Convention on International Civil Aviation on June 14, 1954 was very liberal to Spain, allowing impetus for mass tourism using charter planes.


By the late 1950s and 1960s, these cheap package holidays — which combined flight, transfers and accommodation — provided the first chance for most people in the United Kingdom to have affordable travel abroad. One of the first charter airlines was Euravia, which commenced flights from Manchester Airport in 1961 and Luton Airport in 1962. Despite opening up mass tourism to Crete and the Algarve in 1970, the package tour industry declined during the 1970s. On 15 August 1974, the industry was shaken when the second-largest tour operator, Court Line which operated under the brand names of Horizon and Clarksons, collapsed. Nearly 50,000 tourists were stranded overseas and a further 100,000 faced the loss of booking deposits.


In 2005 a growing number of consumers were avoiding package holidays and were instead travelling with budget airlines and booking their own accommodation. In the UK, the downturn in the package holiday market led to the consolidation of the tour operator market, which is now dominated by a few large tour operators. The major operators are Thomson Holidays and First Choice part of TUI AG and Thomas Cook AG. Under these umbrella brands there exists a whole range of different holiday operators catering to different markets, such as Club 18-30 or Simply Travel. Budget airlines have also created their own package holiday divisions such as Jet2 Holidays.


The trend for package holiday bookings saw a comeback in 2009, as customers sought greater financial security in the wake of a number of holiday and flight companies going bust, and as the hidden costs of 'no-frills' flights increased. Coupled with the search for late holidays as holidaymakers left booking to the last moment, this led to a rise in consumers booking package holidays.


Budget airlines.

A low-cost carrier or low-cost airline (also known as a no-frills, discount or budget carrier or airline) is an airline that generally has lower fares and less comforts. To make up for revenue lost in decreased ticket prices, the airline may charge for extras like food, priority boarding, seat allocating, and baggage etc.


The term originated within the airline industry referring to airlines with a lower operating cost structure than their competitors. While the term is often applied to any carrier with low ticket prices and limited services, regardless of their operating models, low-cost carriers should not be confused with regional airlines that operate short flights without service, or with full-service airlines offering some reduced fares.


While tour and package operators have been offering lower-priced, lower frilled traveling for a large part of modern airline history, not until during the post Vietnam War era did this business model really escalate and take off. Through various ticket consolidators, charter airlines, and innovators in lower frills flying, such as Channel Airways, and Court Line, the traveling public had been conditioned to want to travel to new and increasingly further away and exotic locations on vacation, rather than short-haul junkets to nearby beach resorts.


The first low-cost airline was Southwest Airlines which started flying in 1971.

The first airline offering no-frills transatlantic service was Freddie Laker's Laker Airways, which operated its famous "Skytrain" service between London and New York City during the late 1970s. The service was suspended after Laker's competitors, British Airways and Pan Am, were able to price Skytrain out of the market.


In the United States, airline carriers like America West Airlines which commenced operations after 1978, soon realized a cost of available seat mile advantage in relation to the traditional and established, legacy airlines such as Trans World Airlines and American Airlines. Often this CASM advantage has been attributed, solely to the lower labor costs of the newly hired and lower pay grade workers of new start up carriers, such as PeopleExpress Airlines, Valuejet, Midway Airlines, and their like. However, these lower costs, can also be attributed to the less complex aircraft fleets, and less complex route networks these new carriers began operations with, as well as the vastly less costly and freshly trained labor force.


To combat the new round of low cost and start up entrants into the very competitive and deregulated United States airline industry, the mainline major carriers and network legacy carriers strategically developed no frills divisions within the main airlines brand and corporate structures. Among these were Metrojet and Continental Lite. These so called airlines within an airline however, proved to be very short lived, for the most part and a financial burden which were quickly disposed off when economic rationalization or competitive pressures subsided.


Among these low cost carrier survivors are US Airways, the product of a merger of a low-cost deregulation startup air carrier named AmericaWest and the post 9/11 reorganized through chapter 11 bankruptcy and national network carrier US Air, which markets itself as a low-cost airline and conducts long-haul flights. Usually though, its long-haul international fares are equal to other United States major carriers rather than offering the cost saving advantages of what are normally thought to be of a lower cost carriers offerings and services.