On a good day it takes Holly Wood half an hour to drive from her home in Worthing to the Tui Holiday shop she manages next door to Costa on Littlehampton High Street. Despite the scudding clouds and chilly air, Friday, January 24 was indeed a good day.

All over the UK people were shrugging off austerity, currency fears and Brexit uncertainty to book their place in the sun. Holly, a mother-of-three who started selling holidays in 2000 as a 15-year-old apprentice, had never seen it so good.

“The phones were ringing, there were queues out the door and people were booking not just one holiday but the second and the third at the same time,” she recalls. “It was incredible.”

Her customers were among the six million British travellers putting their trust in the world’s biggest holiday company: an empire with outposts in 180 regions and a turnover of £17 billion in 2019. At the start of this year the German-owned organisation had 13,000 employees in the UK alone, more than 400 hotels, 150 aircraft and 17 cruise ships, moving people around the world in such volume that entire economies have become dependent upon it.

With its rival Thomas Cook no longer trading and a public seemingly deaf to the environmental activist Greta Thunberg’s pleas to stop flying, Tui had enjoyed its best January in years. More than a third of all available holidays had been sold and, at Wigmore House, the company’s glitzy UK head office in Luton, the top brass were sure 2020 was going to be a year to remember.

“We were 20 per cent up in sales and everything was looking really good,” says Andrew Flintham, managing director of Tui for the UK and Ireland. The Tui Airways managing director, Dawn Wilson, agrees. “This was going to be our best year ever.”

There was only one tiny cloud on the horizon: a flu outbreak somewhere in China — and because the Tui cruise ship Marella Discovery was sailing in Asia, the press had asked for comment. So that Friday, as Wood was preparing her shop for another hectic day of trading, Tui’s corporate communications team issued a brief statement announcing that the company was “aware of the novel coronavirus”, adding that it was “observing the situation”.