Clarksons Travel Group

Clarksons Travel Group was a package tour operator in the UK during the 1960s and early 1970s. The company ran into financial difficulties and was taken over by its major supplier of air travel, Court Line. However, after two years, on 15 August 1974, Court Line collapsed, taking down Clarksons with at least £7m owing to 100,000 holidaymakers and possibly twice as much.

The company was based appropriately in Sun Street, EC2 in the City of London. It specialised in cheap package holidays which included accommodation, full or half-board and air transport from the UK to the holiday destination.

Destinations included Spain, Portugal, Italy, Yugoslavia and Greece as well as Mediterranean cruises and a wide range of short tours to European cities and wine regions. A typical example was £50 with full-board in Palma, Majorca for 14 nights. Flights also were made to Tunisia and other destinations.

The company installed the very first 'Real-Time' computer system in the western hemisphere which handled bookings, flights and hotels all-in-one. The system was a UNIVAC 96K 9400 card reading real time computer, also with a complete terminal using a teletype-like data entry point with hexadecimal data entered by pressing numerous buttons illuminated on the main board. There were 6 magnetic tape machines and two magnetic Disk drives, each 10 megabytes with six heavy metal disks for each machine, with a high-speed line printer, capable of printing charter airline tickets at a rate of about one every three seconds on multi-part paper. The basement room was maintained at 64°F and 65% humidity, and operated 7-days-per-week, 52 weeks per year.

Clarksons had an air terminal at 202-204 Finchley Road, London, NW3, close to the junction with Frognal Lane. This was used for coach transport to Luton Airport, the main airport served by Court Line, which was Clarksons' main air transport supplier.

Court Line eventually had to step in and bail out the company when it went into financial difficulties as it was their largest customer. The collapse was referred to recently as "the most spectacular failure in package holiday history", not even surpassed by the subsequent failures of Laker Airways in 1982 and Intasun in 1991. Flight International magazine estimated that in the five years before the collapse, eight million holidays had averaged £1 below cost.

...
Wikipedia