ABSTRACT
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.
