( History of ) The First Travel Agency

It all started in 1841. A London temperance league wanted to take a trip from Leicester to Loughborough. The 540 members paid Thomas Cook a fee to arrange the excursion, launching the birth of the travel industry.

Cook made no profit on those travel arrangements. He did, however, see the “need in the market,” so by 1845 he became the first full-time travel agent. By 1851, he was arranging ocean voyages and hotel accommodations for over 150,000 visitors to London's World Exposition.

The “guided tour” also began with Thomas Cook, when he escorted the first “grand tour” of Europe in 1856. His company went on to open offices in the United States and to create the first around-the-world escorted tour in 1872, thus originating the term “Cook's Tour.”

American Express Company, the first travel agency in the U.S., was formed by a group of businessmen in Buffalo, NY. They were responding to the popular need for express services, brought on by western expansion to Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa.

American Express directors turned down the chance to expand services to California in 1852, leaving the way open for Wells Fargo & Company to blaze the trail. Henry Wells and William F. Fargo were two American Express directors who proposed the California expansion of the company. They formed what became the leading express firm of the Western U.S. Under a special arrangement, American Express handled all the express services up to the Missouri River and Wells Fargo took the express business west of the river.

The travel agency's staple, the ‘traveler's check,' got its start in 1891, introduced by American Express. It was designed to meet the needs of U.S. travelers who had difficulty obtaining cash while visiting European countries. The new device was backed by American Express' prestige and a guarantee that no one who accepted it would suffer a financial loss.

American Express and Cook were not the only ancestors of today's travel agency business. Among other early companies in the industry are Agenzia Fugazi of San Francisco (circa 1872) and Prisco Travel of New York (circa 1891).