How we see CSR

"Thomas Cook had a clear vision when he devised the first package holiday over 160 years ago. He believed affordable travel could change working people’s lives for the better. His company was inspired by a strong sense of social justice and moral responsibility.

Today, we are still inspired to deliver our founder’s values. We believe they make a tangible difference to our customers’ holiday experience and to all the other people whose lives we touch.

In our corporate social responsibility policy, we define CSR as ‘operating responsibly to minimise negative and enhance positive environmental, social and economic impact: ensuring the long-term sustainability of our business and of the resources on which we depend’.

The nature of our business means that we cannot treat CSR as peripheral or optional. The environment and communities in destinations where we operate are integral to the products we sell: protecting them is fundamental to our business and to everyone on whom our business depends."

Manny Fontenla-Novoa
Chief Executive Officer

Read our CSR policy in full on our CSR website at: http://csr.thomascookgroup.co.uk

How we manage CSR

CSR is recognised as key to the Group: strategy and progress against targets are reviewed at the highest level. The Board’s Health, Safety & Environmental Committee meets regularly to review the management of health, safety and environmental risks and their impact on our activities, and the development and implementation of relevant Group policies.

It oversees the work of the Sustainability team, which formulates and implements CSR strategy, shares best practice around the Group, and reports on performance. The team’s primary role is to help secure the long-term sustainability of the business by integrating our CSR strategy into our normal business culture. It now has four full-time professionals.

Key stakeholders

Our stakeholders include customers, employees, investors, suppliers, local communities, industry partners, governments and non-governmental organisations, in our source countries and the destinations where we operate.

We work with them on identifying the issues that can move our business forward. In particular, we need the support of customers, employees and suppliers: without them we cannot achieve real sustainability, so we attach particular importance to raising their awareness of CSR issues and work with them to enhance policies, standards and practices.

Focus areas

These are the areas that particularly concern us in relation to our principal stakeholder groups and activities:

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Customers

To succeed as a business, we have to build the best possible relationships with our customers and build trust with everyone we take on holiday. We strive for continuous improvement across all our customer-facing activities. This was recognised by a number of industry awards during the year, including three of the top British Travel Awards, two at the Globe Travel Awards including Best Ski/Activity Operator for the fifth year running, Best Sun Holiday Tour Operator (also for the fifth year running) at the Irish Travel Trade News Awards, and three top awards at the Scottish Passenger Agents Association Awards, including overall Best Tour Operator.

We listen to our customers through independent research and their direct feedback, and use their comments to guide changes and improvements. We pay particular attention to customers’ health and safety: our move in 2008 to devolve responsibility for this to the operating divisions helps us respond quickly to local conditions and regulatory requirements.

Employees

Our success depends absolutely on how well we recruit, develop, train and motivate our 31,000 employees. Since the merger, Thomas Cook has adopted a common set of five values as the template for employee behaviour throughout the – organisation with an initial focus on one value in particular: ‘united as one team’. In 2009 the emphasis will move to another of these values: pioneering our future. The PROUD values are set out in the People section. In 2008, we introduced share plans for all employees, launched consistent rewards and succession planning for senior managers across the Group, and created a fast-track development programme for our high-potential employees.

Home communities

We believe we should play an active part in the communities where most of our people live and work – through encouraging charitable donations and by supporting employee volunteering and fundraising. We have been developing a more coherent framework for our support, including establishing the Thomas Cook Foundation as our primary vehicle for charitable giving by our customers and employees, who will be invited to serve as trustees.

Increasingly, we focus our community and charitable support on causes related to children, education and the environment. During 2008 the Paediatric Intensive Care and Paediatric High Dependency Units opened in the Thomas Cook Children’s Critical Care Centre in London’s Kings College Hospital. We met our 2005 pledge to cover the cost of building materials, reaching a final target of £2.3m through funds raised from customers and employees.

Destination communities

For destination communities and environments, tourism can bring great economic and social benefits. It also provides an incentive to preserve precious natural attractions and cultural heritage. But if managed irresponsibly, it can harm communities and damage the human and natural heritage that tourists have come to see. To avoid fostering these negative consequences, we work closely with the Travel Foundation, an initiative launched by the UK Government and major travel operators, which focuses on people and the environment in tourism destinations. It has become one of our key partners and, in 2008, our customers raised over £350,000 towards its work.

Supply chain

Our principal suppliers are hotel owners and operators. We are working with them to ensure increasingly high health, safety and environmental standards. We have worked with the Federation of Tour Operators (FTO) to launch the Travelife Awards an – EU-backed and internationally recognised sustainability scheme for hotels and other tourism partners. To achieve a Travelife Bronze, Silver or Gold Award, suppliers must be audited across a wide range of sustainability criteria. During the year we audited 113 properties, and we currently feature over 70 award winners in our brochures. During a visit to Cyprus, members of our Sustainability team completed eight Travelife audits while also promoting water conservation – the island is suffering critical water shortages – and hotels are keen to adopt the initiatives they learned about during the audits.

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Environment

Our Group environmental policy commits us to doing as much as we can to protect the resources on which our business depends. Our progress in these areas was recognised at the 2008 British Travel Awards, where we won silver awards in the Most Environmentally Responsible Airline and Most Environmentally Responsible Large Tour Operator categories. We constantly strive to reduce negative impacts resulting from our operations and help our suppliers to do the same. We focus particularly on aviation emissions and noise, natural resource use and waste management.

Our work in these areas has gained considerable impetus from the appointment of a full-time environmental manager in September, after a lengthy search for someone with the right qualifications and experience. We are making progress in monitoring our environmental impacts and fuel consumption and emission data for our UK airline is included in our online CSR report. This report includes some data for energy consumption in our offices. In the meantime, we have developed environmental labels for our UK aircraft fleet; these give boarding passengers environmental information in a form similar to the labels used for cars and household appliances. The information will also be published on our UK airline website at www.thomascookairlines.co.uk. We now need to work hard to create a more consistent programme with our airlines across the Group.

More information

The Thomas Cook Group corporate website includes a CSR section which sets out our policies, standards and performance. We also publish an annual report on our CSR priorities, activities and performance; to conserve resources this is available online only. We welcome your feedback on all aspects of CSR and you can find full contact details on the website.

CSR website and annual CSR report: http://csr.thomascookgroup.co.uk
Email and contact details: http://csr.thomascookgroup.co.uk/tcg/services/contact/