The company’s UK director of retail and customer experience, Kathryn Darbandi, said decisions on adding stores in locations where Cook was not represented would be made within the next year.

“I believe we will open four or five in the next 12 months,” she said. “We are starting to look at acquisitions, which is a first – there are some towns I believe we should be in that we are not.”

Thomas Cook and Co-operative Travel operate 820 shops. Darbandi added: “We absolutely do not have a plan to close a lot of stores,” but conceded that “the odd few” would close as leases expired “where it does not make sense to renew”.
She said the Co-op name would stay “for the foreseeable future”.

“Thomas Cook is the best national brand, Co-op is the best regional brand and customers do not make the connection.”
The difference would be made more apparent in the forthcoming peak sales period, she said. “We’ll pull these brands apart a bit more on the high street. There’ll be different windows and a slightly different product range.”

One key tactic in the peak period will be to make more use of the budget Airtours brand, with Darbandi stating that Cook was “looking to do more with the Airtours brand and to refresh it.”

In a further boost to its retail side, the operator is reintroducing paper brochures for some programmes that were previously online.

December will see Exclusively Adults reintroduced as a traditional brochure, with a relaunched Manos programme also in the pipeline. Separate Airtours and Thomas Cook All Inclusive paper brochures will also be available in shops, having previously featured online only.

“Our general view is that people are not ready to give brochures up, but we are going to be smarter about how many customers take,” she said.