Thomas Cook and MyTravel staff fear job cuts following £3bn merger plan

Employees at Thomas Cook and MyTravel must wait to see who will lose their jobs after the tourism giants announced plans for a £3bn merger.

The enlarged organisation will be called Thomas Cook and will be based in the UK – but large-scale job cuts are expected among the 19,000 combined workforce.

A spokeswoman for ­Thomas Cook – whose German parent company KarstadtQuelle would own 52% of the new firm – told ­Personnel Today that the firm’s HR department was as much in the dark as anyone about redundancies.

“Rather than the HR department, we are talking to staff through our internal communications,” she said.

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“It is very limited what we can say. There are going to be areas where we overlap, but it is too early to say how it will play out for individual roles,” she added.

The merger is still subject to a vote by MyTravel shareholders, and it needs to be cleared by monopolies watchdogs in Brussels.