Skift Take
It was the appearance everyone was waiting for. The two former Thomas Cook CEOs had very, very different ideas about how to run a travel company. The problem is that the business is no longer around, meaning they are both somewhat tarnished by failure.
Two of Thomas Cook’s former CEOs clashed over the business strategies they both employed at a hearing into the company’s collapse.
There were myriad reasons behind its failure and many of them can be traced back more than a decade, encompassing both the reigns of Manny Fontenla-Novoa, the CEO between 2003 and 2011, and Harriet Green, CEO between 2012 and 2014.
Both got the opportunity on Wednesday to explain their actions during the third day of evidence at the UK parliament’s Thomas Cook inquiry. Unsurprisingly, they saw things very differently.
Fontenla-Novoa’s tenure saw the massive expansion of the company, its ill-fated mergers with MyTravel and the Co-operative Travel and the accumulation of debt. Green undid most of the work, selling off businesses and closing shops.
In effect, Green and Fontenla-Novoa represented two different ways of running a business. Fontenla-Novoa had spen
