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To evaluate Thomas Cook’s financial condition, students deploy financial analysis techniques including comparative analysis. The role of financial reporting in impressions management is considered in two respects: firstly, the use of separately disclosed items by companies; and secondly, the treatment of goodwill on acquisition.

The case draws on a range of public data from Annual Reports and secondary sources including the Department of Business Energy and Industrial Strategy investigation into the failure of Thomas Cook.

Thomas Cook Group plc’s (Thomas Cook) was one of the oldest travel firms, yet its apparently sudden failure on 23 September 2019 left 600,000 holidaymakers stranded and sparked the largest ever peacetime repatriation of British citizens at cost of £83m to the Department of Transport. Around 9,000 employees who had expected to be paid on 30 September were left unpaid.Could CEO Peter Frankhauser have addressed the challenges faced by Thomas Cook more effectively during his tenure or was the company locked into a flightpath to failure? The case highlights the importance of context when performing financial analysis and encourages students to evaluate the challenges posed by the current standards related to accounting for goodwill and corporate reporting of underlying performance.

This case can be used in undergraduate financial reporting and current issues in accounting courses/modules at the postgraduate level.

This chapter provides an insider perspective on the Quantified Self (QS) community. It is argued that the overall approach and methods used in the QS community have not been adequately described. Consequently, the aim of the chapter is to give an account of the work performed by self-trackers in what we coin the 1-Person-Laboratory (1PL). Additionally, the chapter describes other aspects of the 1PL, for example the methods, procedures and instrumentation that are being used and the knowledge sharing taking place in the QS community. With a point of departure in empirical cases it is demonstrated how QS self-trackers put their own questions, observations and subjective experience front and centre by using their own instrumentation and data sets in their personal laboratories. In the 1PL, the causalities that are looked for are not aimed at generalisation to an entire population; on the contrary, the causal connections on the level of the person are essential for discovery by the individual.

Financial bankruptcy is inevitable in the tourism and hospitality ecosystem. Despite the pertinence of tourism and hospitality businesses going into bankruptcy, limited studies have investigated the early warning signs and likelihood of a financial bankruptcy occurring in tourism and hospitality firms. This study examined the predictive value of financial ratios as potential indicators in predicting bankruptcy among tourism and hospitality firms.

Altman's z-score bankruptcy prediction model was applied through five key financial ratios to predict bankruptcy of the Thomas Cook Travel Group over a ten year period (2008–2018).

The key findings of this study strongly suggest that besides the size and location of the firm, financial ratios are reliable predictors and play a pivotal role in predicting the bankruptcy of a tourism and hospitality business.

The paper provides key stakeholders to adopt checks and balances to identify financial distressed tourism firms through financial ratios.

This is the first academic paper to inspect the financial history of Thomas Cook Travel Group in a financial ratio context, particularly following the bankruptcy of the firm in 2019.

There has been a tremendous decline in the use of the death penalty in the United States. Recent research using county-level data shows that a small minority of locales in the country account for death sentences and even fewer for executions. Drawing on theoretical work that seeks to account for why these locales continue to use capital punishment, we provide in this chapter a thick description of Maricopa County, Arizona, one of the most active death penalty locales in the contemporary United States. In doing so, we demonstrate how capital punishment operates in a field of violently defended racial boundaries. Our chapter shows the roles of various local actors across time in fortifying such racial boundaries through historical white terrorism and more recent reinforcement of zones of racial exclusion that are embodied especially in communicated fears of “illegal immigrant gangs.” We contend that the case of Maricopa County points to the importance of attending to racist localisms as a catalyst for the continued implementation of the death penalty in the United States.

The purpose of this paper is to test existing theoretical models relating to management agreements and “developer abuse” in relation to multi‐unit housing developments through applying them to a new jurisdiction: New Zealand.

The paper uses a combination of case studies from reported legal cases, and a socio‐legal framework, to apply existing models to New Zealand.

The analysis shows that existing models are accurate, but can be improved and refined through a deeper examination of the issues arising from decided cases. New phenomena were identified that require more attention.

This analysis is restricted to decided cases and empirical research may allow further findings. The research was also limited to New Zealand as a test of existing models.

The analysis in this paper shows that there are difficulties with recent law reforms, and more attention is needed to legislative solutions to the problems identified in existing literature and decided cases.

This research may help educate the public about the issues arising from management agreements.

By applying existing models relating to body corporate management agreements and “developer abuse” to a new jurisdiction, this paper shows the usefulness of those models. The models remain to be tested in other jurisdictions, and this paper adds to existing frameworks for those scholars who do so. It will also have use for policy makers in this area.

The first series of colours experimented upon was the high‐grade Kohnstamm colours, which have been physiologically tested and prepared especially for use in colouring food products. The results recorded below are not the results of a single determination, but the experiments were repeated until we were satisfied, working with the chemicals we used, and by the methods employed, that the results were uniform and reliable. The results with the Kohnstamm dyes are as follows : —

The FIFA Museum in Zurich is a division of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) and has been opened in 2016 with the aspiration to become one of the key attractions, both in Zurich as well as in the association football context. As with many tourist attractions, staying on top of the game is a challenge. Unlike other museums, the FIFA Museum took an open innovation approach in developing their concept, especially for those parts that deal with visitor interactions. With the goal of being not only a football museum, but also an attractive and leading event location in Switzerland, event ideas were collected using a crowdsourcing approach, managed through a platform run by ATIZO. Through this community, the museum could design attractive event concepts, succeeded to increase visitor engagement and built a loyal base of innovators and future guests. This chapter describes the crowdsourcing methodology applied by the FIFA Museum, critically examines the process, advantages, and disadvantages of the methodology chosen, and concludes by giving recommendations for similar cases. The particular focus lies on the application of the crowdsourcing method in areas where a strong fan community can be involved in the development process, such as, e.g., in the association football context.

The purpose of this paper is to increase understanding of the logic of business network formation among the co-located and external actors of a facility.

The research adopts a theory-building approach through developing propositions inductively from the empirical case study on four purposefully sampled modern service station facilities. The focus is on analyzing how a facility and its inherent co-located actors represent an entity that forms a business network with external actors in the facility’s environment.

The findings propose that when co-located with a large number of actors, the facility and its actors represent an entity that is connected to a wide business network of multiple external actors. On the other hand, when co-located with a small number of actors, the facility becomes a part of the overall supply in the surrounding business environment with a differentiated offering for competitive advantage.

The research suggests that an appropriate co-locating strategy, for example, when planning the tenant mix of the facility, can contribute to creating a vivid business network in the external environment, which raises the facility to a role of a central entity in such a network.

The findings explaining how co-location affects the businesses within the facility and within a wider networked environment are novel to the scholarly knowledge on co-location. The research bridges the theories of co-location and business networks that have been treated as separate discourses in previous research.

This paper aims to investigate how brand identity is co-created, with a specific focus on how employees contributed to the process in a five-star hotel setting. The focus of this study is on understanding how two hotels planned and executed their brand identity strategy simultaneously, differentiating one from the other and how employees actively participated in this process.

A longitudinal case study approach was adopted, centred on building the identity of two luxury hotels owned by a single company in Seoul, Korea. Various organizational documents were collected and analyzed to understand the brand identity of the hotels and how brand co-creation has been implemented. In addition, semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with 42 employees to understand the brand co-creation process from their perspective.

The brand co-creation process of the hotels was conducted simultaneously and evolved over the following four phases, with employees’ roles varying in each phase, namely, establishing a clear brand identity strategy; designing and selecting sensory identity; aligning organizational identity; and delivering brand identity through external communication. Employees that participated in brand co-creation enhanced their brand knowledge, developed emotional bonds with the brand and were motivated to deliver the brand identity. Furthermore, those that immersed themselves in the new brand identities were able to enable positive guest perceptions towards the brand image, which consequently enhanced employees’ pride in their work.

This research advances the brand management literature in defining branding and brand identity elements, as well as emphasizing the importance of consistent branding. In addition, the current study expands the scope of internal branding, highlighting the process of brand co-creation and the role of employees as active participants. Moreover, it reveals that employees’ participation enhances not only their brand knowledge but also their emotional bonds with the brand. The proposed conceptual framework demonstrates the flow of branding elements, brand identity elements and the “infinite loop” of employee participation in brand co-creation.

The case study approach adopted here enables an in-depth investigation of employee participation in brand co-creation, including their different roles and activities in the process; a phenomenon that has not been adequately explored in previous research.