The seeds of modern travel concepts like package holidays, chartered trains and planes, and traveller's cheques were sown in the year 1841 when a Baptist preacher called Thomas Cook walked from his home town of Market Harborough to Leicester to go to a meeting of the Temperance movement which believes in abstinence from alcohol.

Thomas Cook, who was thirty two years old at the time, was a keen advocate of the Temperance movement and used to arrange meetings and processions in Market Harborough in the English county of Leicestershire to promote the message that alcohol was bad for society. During his walk to Leicester from Market Harborough, Thomas Cook had the idea that the members of the Temperance society could arrange a special train to take their supporters to and from the Temperance meetings.

Thomas Cook went ahead and organized the world's first privately chartered, publicly advertised train in the year 1841. The arrangement was with the Midland Counties Railway Company, and Thomas Cook was paid a percentage of what the railway company received from the train tickets. This was the first of many train charters that he organized for Temperance societies and Sunday schools in Market Harborough and the surrounding areas. By the year 1844 these train charters had become such a success that the Midland Counties Railway Company made a permanent arrangement with Thomas Cook, and he started a business organising excursions on chartered trains, working from his home in Market Harborough.

Thomas Cook started to grow his business by organising tours that went further than the area immediately around Market Harborough. In the year 1846 he arranged for three hundred and fifty people from Leicester to go on a tour of Scotland. Larger and larger tours followed, and in the year 1851 he organized a tour for 165,000 people to London to visit the Great Exhibition. His first international tour followed, when he took people from Leicester to the Paris Exhibition.

After this, in the 1860s, he arranged grand tours to Europe, Africa, and the United States of America. He also opened a travel agency office in Fleet Street in London in 1860s. The USA tours included visits to a number of areas where some of the battles of the American Civil War were fought. The company began offering a tour of the world in the year 1872. For the sum of two hundred guineas, people would get an Atlantic crossing by steam ship, travel across America by stage coach, a crossing of the Pacific by paddle steamer to Japan, and a journey that took the travellers across India and China. The whole trip took twenty two days.

During this stage of the business Thomas Cook moved from Market Harborough to London. Thomas Cook retired from the business that he founded in the year 1879 and left it in the hands of his son John. Thomas Cook moved back to Market Harborough to enjoy his retirement. By the year 1888, the Thomas Cook company had set up operational centres across the globe, and by the year 1890, the business had sold in excess of three million tickets.