Though it has now become a ritual for 17 million people, Thomas Cook's brainchild may be on its last legs. The package holiday profiled

"Please take all your longings with you," advised the Gatwick Express intercom last Sunday as the train pulled in to the airport. And the passengers on the 6.45am who had, many of them, already been awake for several hours, probably did, longing most of all to arrive at their destination.

But the flight for most travellers would have been hours away. By 8.15am, the queue for the 10.30am to Puerto Plaza already snaked from Zone K back to Zone G. (Where, one wonders, will these queuers go when the new 656-seater jumbos come into commission in 2005?) These days, the airlines want you at the airport two and a half hours before flight time. The airports, too, would rather passengers arrive early enough to spend their waiting time shopping, since retail now accounts for a sizeable part of British Airports Authority income. Currently BAA is making £3.79 per passenger or £440m-plus a year. Having lost quite a packet on the Europe-enforced changes to the duty-free regime last year, BAA would like to see that figure increased considerably. The result is an interminable round of waiting and shopping and snacking. Arriving early also ensures that travellers are there to hear the announcements that there are major problems with their flights.

Last Sunday, that was the fate of travellers to Antigua, whose plane was delayed sine die. Breakfast was being served at the Hilton ("Please make your own way there," said an unhelpful announcement). The departures screen promised an update at 5pm. Elsewhere, there was a baggage-belt failure and repeated tannoy apologies. Nonetheless, Britain's second-largest airport was calm enough compared to a few weeks before, when the Gatwick computer crashed and left thousands stranded. Better, too, than the last time I travelled as a passenger, and a woman in the adjacent queue had a heart attack, giving every staff member an excuse to shout at complainants: "Don't you know that poor woman is very ill?"

Over the next few weekends, a record number of passengers will pass through UK airports for their main summer holiday, taking "all their longings with them" to Spain or Greece or the Caribbean. These dreams include, if the researchers are to be believed, sunshine, warm sea, golden sands and good food, naturally. But also for the children to be busy and happy, luxury accommodation, sex, more sex, and romance (the latter mainly the ambition of the single female homo ludens). Then there are more abstract ambitions: relaxation from stress, rest from overwork, relief from drudgery, repair of frayed marriages and partnerships, and the chance for families to enjoy each other's company. One in three holidaymakers puts sleep as the top holiday priority, according to a survey earlier this year by Escape Routes, the travel and leisure magazine.

We demand a lot of our package holidays, it seems, but this may not be unreasonable since holidays cost the average family £18.50 a week, or about 5.4 per cent of all household spending. This is four and a half times what we spent in 1968, when foreign travel was still the preserve of the upper-income groups and the Balearics were yet to be uncovered.

Of the estimated 34 million overseas trips that Britons will take this year, more than 17 million will be package holidays. Spain is far and away the most-visited country (Majorca the top destination). An astonishing one-third of British adults have been to a Spanish "Costa". Almost as many have been to a Balearic Island (Majorca, Ibiza or Minorca ), and one in five has been to the Canary Islands.

The grandfather of package holidays was a teetotaller called Thomas Cook who gained his inspiration after walking 11 miles to a temperance meeting. He decided to let the train take the strain in future and, in July 1841, he chartered a train from the East Midlands Railway company to take a group of 570 temperance supporters from Leicester to Loughborough for a shilling each. History does not record whether he made a profit, but he saw the possibilities of the package journey and soon after chartered the first holiday excursion train from Leicester to Liverpool with much publicity and brass-band fanfares either end.

His business flourished just within Britain until 1855, when an international exhibition was held in Paris. Cook approached the ferry companies, but was rebuffed by those operating out of the French ports. So he conceived a grander plan and escorted a party of tourists on a tour of northern Europe via Harwich, Antwerp, Brussels, Cologne, the Rhine, Heidelberg and Baden-Baden, ending up in Paris. That was the beginning of the European package tour. Soon Cook was using his entrepreneurial skills further afield, notably in the Swiss Alps and, eventually in 1869, even Egypt, where, eight years later, his son opened the first hotel at Luxor.

Cook had given the bourgeoisie the chance to visit the hallowed shrines of the 18th-century Grand Tour at a pace and cost made possible only by the railway. Naturally, the rich were not pleased at sharing their leisure pursuits with the riff-raff, just as today's middle classes have hated having first their Costas then their Greek islands invaded by pubs and discos.

In 1864, Cook had made his first accompanied excursion to Italy and provoked a report in Blackwood's Magazine that "some unscrupulous man has devised the project of conducting some 40 or 50 persons . . . from London to Naples and back for a fixed sum. He contracts to carry them, feed them, and amuse them . . . As I write, the cities of Italy are deluged with droves of these creatures."

For "droves of creatures" read "lager louts" and for the condescending Blackwood's writer, substitute any of the broadsheet travel supplements which urge their middle-class readers ever further off the beaten track so as to avoid the wrong sort of people.

The railways created and defined mass tourism, taking the middle-classes to places such as Cannes and Nice which had been the prerogative of a tiny, rich minority. But, as Nicholas Faith describes in his book The World the Railways Made, the railways did not democratise holidays, any more than cheap air travel does today. Once the railways had popularised a resort, the upper classes abandoned it. Once they had moved on, eventually the hordes followed. It is a dance of popularisation that cannot continue indefinitely, at least not on one planet.

This year, we will spend £29bn on holidays (for comparison, the entire retail industry turns over £200bn). There is talk of the market having reached saturation point (how many holidays can a family take a year?), but the industry still spends a quarter of a billion pounds on advertising to get us to spend more.

One would have expected, with so much money at stake, our holiday hopes and ambitions to be among the best examined and surveyed aspects of our lives, yet much of the publicised research is unilluminating and some of it even comical in its banality. A survey published on the internet in May by NOP revealed that, even though holidaymakers are flying to ever more exotic destinations, more than a quarter choose to stay in their rooms rather than explore their surroundings. It could be that this figure includes the one in ten which the same survey reveals is on holiday only for sex. But what are the others doing?

There is a tiny bit of good news for the romance seekers: holiday romances do last - for a bit, anyway. Escape Routes found six out of ten Britons claimed to have had a holiday fling: 40 per cent of these flings ended with the holiday; a further 33 per cent petered out after a few letters; but 14 per cent lasted for six months. And that still leaves 13 per cent. Who knows, they may still be together.

The research that will send shivers down the spines of high-street travel agents is Mintel's finding earlier this year that we may finally be tiring of package holidays and be entering the age of the "independent" holidaymaker. These independent travellers want to assemble their own packages, seek out their own (cheap) flights and accommodation, and have been given a boost by the success of the new no-frills airlines. Currently hovering around 50 per cent of the market volume, independent holidays will soon become the majority, says Mintel.

But the really major change to the industry will be the advent of the A3XX - Airbus Industrie's new 656-seater superjumbo, scheduled to enter into service by 2005. The 580-tonne passenger plane has so far cost £8bn to develop and has the backing of four governments (Britain, France, Germany and Spain), which are contributing a third of the costs.

It brings a raft of problems, including environmental concerns, all of which are existing problems writ large. For example, will the airports be able to cope? Probably not. A Department of Environment report released last month predicted that four new Gatwicks would be needed to meet demand over the next 20 years. The report predicts that passenger numbers will more than double from 160 million a year now to 333 million a year by 2015. But Heathrow's Terminal 5 caused enough problems. Will residents near airports put up with, first, the extension of airports and expansion of runways and, second, more aircraft noise? Then there is the loading. Some estimates say boarding and disembarking could take two hours - although Airbus says this is too pessimistic.

The future of these new giants will depend on passenger enthusiasm. Maybe Airbus executives should get down to Gatwick early one holiday weekend morning and ask the punters in the check-in lines whether they would like to add another two hours on the tarmac to the endless chain of waiting.

Meanwhile, if you are taking a holiday to escape reports of Britain's soaring crime rate, think again. University of Plymouth researchers recently found that British holidaymakers were 15 times more likely to be robbed abroad than if they stayed at home.

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