Thomas Cook denies ditching Cresta
Thomas Cook has confirmed that it has rebranded its citybreaks programme City Escapes, but it insists that it hasn’t ditched the popular Cresta brand.
The new Thomas Cook City Escapes brings together product from its retail brand Flexible Trips as well as from Cresta into a single booking platform for stores and for online customers.
However, the Cresta website has been retained, for the time being, to avoid losing customers loyal to the brand.
Thomas Cook City Escapes will offer over 31,000 hotels in over 2000 destinations around the world, plus a choice of travel arrangements including low cost flights on 90 routes with Ryanair.
"Our research shows that 77% of Thomas Cook customers visiting our stores to book their beach break also enjoy three city breaks a year," said Mark Maddock, director of City & Domestic & Contracting Cities.
"Thomas Cook already offers city break product, but this previously sat across multiple brands. The simplification of our proposition has been made to harness those customers who might have searched for their city break elsewhere."
It will have a new, dedicated B2B cities booking platform for its internal and third party travel agencies, and it will re-position its B2C cities web-pages.
Thomas Cook and The Co-operative Travel agents will be provided with ‘extensive’ training on the new system. The City Breaks tab on thomascook.com will be rebranded ‘City Escapes’ as part of a strategy aimed at increasing web penetration.
However, a spokesman said it had not considered retiring the Cresta brand.
"We are keeping the Cresta brand and website to retain those loyal Cresta customers, while serving the needs and requirements of those that were previously unaware of our offering via the new City Escapes proposition," he said.
"It would be unwise to consider ‘retiring’ the Cresta brand in its entirety while we still have loyal customers, but we will keep our options open."
Linsey McNeill
Editor Linsey McNeill has been writing about travel for more than three decades. Bylines include The Times, Telegraph, Observer, Guardian and Which? plus the South China Morning Post. She also shares insider tips on thetraveljournalist.co.uk
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