Goodbye Thomson, hello TUI – how Germany beat Britain in the battle of the sunlounger

Ends of eras come in different sizes and styles. The clunky British steam train hauling its last scheduled passenger service. The final performance at an old theatre, slated for demolition. The climactic fixture at a rickety but much-loved football ground, set to be pulled down and replaced by a mega-arena with many more seats but rather less soul.

Today's headline that the word "Thomson" is to vanish from UK high streets - and from the internet - is not a changing of the guard of such palpable impact. There will be no trail of smoke or whistle blast from the train track beyond the horizon; no soft applause or regretful supporters' chant echoing down the back streets. It is, after all, a mere remodelling exercise, a simple redesigning of an enormous firm's stationery, a shrinking of seven letters to five - as of today, "Thomson" is the more slimline "TUI UK".

But make no mistake, while no tickertape will fall from the sky, this is the end of an era - one which shaped the way Britons have travelled for more than half a century.

The bare details sound even less like a crossing of the Rubicon. The Thomson brand is being subsumed into the wider TUI - the German tourism conglomerate which bought it in 2000, when it was called Preussag AG. Since 2002, this Hanover-based giant has operated under the moniker "TUI AG" - which stands for Touristik Union International Aktiengesellschaft. Thomson, a very recognisable part of the UK travel industry, was left to work alone for 15 years - but has now been brought conclusively under the main corporate umbrella.

This is not (a) bad company to keep - TUI Group is the largest leisure and travel outfit in the world, the owner of a wealth of travel agencies, hotels and cruise ships, as well as six airlines. The mechanics of Thomson will live on at the heart of a superstructure, and travellers will barely notice the difference. From now on, customers who would have booked with Thomson should point their internet browsers at tui.co.uk, where they will receive much the same service as they did last month - sun-and-sea escapes and family bargains in various warm corners of our home planet.

So why the talk of changing eras? Because, for all the brightness of the onetime Thomson's reimagined future, there is a certain sorrow to its being erased from the everyday.

It has, after all, been a fixture in UK life since 1965. Its provenance may have been Canadian - it was effectively the invention of Roy Thomson, a Toronto-born newspaper proprietor (who became the First Baron Thomson of Fleet a year before he created the company, in 1964) - but it always felt distinctly British in essence, lighting up town centres from Norwich to Newcastle, and Dundee to Droitwich and Dagenham.

It initially came into existence - in the year The Beatles managed to release both Help! and Rubber Soul - as Thomson Tour Operations, which was itself part of the broader Thomson Travel Group. Roy Thomson had had the brainwave of buying up four rival travel agencies - Skytours, Riviera, Luxitours and Gaytours - plus the airline Britannia Airways, and combining them into one whole. At first, this slick strategy foundered. The merger was cosmetic, and the individual agencies were allowed to continue to compete with each other within the group.

It was not until 1971, when this scrapping bag of cats was officially reconfigured as Thomson Holidays, that the company began to soar. It quickly became a dominant figure in the new package-holiday market, making hay and profit by sending Britons on inexpensive fly-and-flop escapes to the sunny shores of Majorca, the Canary Islands and Tunisia. Success followed success. In 1972, Thomson acquired then-small chain of agents Lunn Poly, and transformed it into a high-street stalwart. Its shops would be rebranded using the Thomson name in 2004.

Now Thomson itself has been rebranded - in a minor marketing revolution that is being sold as something great and glorious.

"After taking more than 100 million customers on holiday as Thomson over the last six decades, we understand that one size no longer fits all," says Nick Longman, the managing director of TUI UK. "People are looking beyond the traditional package holiday; they want a holiday that is hand-picked just for them, and the next evolution in mass-market travel is personalisation and customisation. It is our ambition to create holidays so personalised they 'choose you'."

Wise words or airbrushed corporate-speak? Perhaps a little of both. Thomson had not - like the recently departed Monarch Airlines - been left behind by the modern age, and could certainly have continued in its established guise. But it has been swept up instead by changing times, and the trend to globalisation.

This is unlikely to be a bad thing for the company or for its customers, but there has to be a slight tinge of sadness today that its name is a thing of the past (even its seafaring arm, Thomson Cruises, is no more, given a sprinkle of the exotic and sent back into the marketplace as "Marella Cruises" - while Thomson Airways is becoming "TUI Airways"). Onwards into tomorrow - but a moment of respect, please, for yesterday.