The collapse of Thomas Cook has plunged governments across Europe and Africa into crisis-planning mode as they help with the repatriation of more than 500,000 stranded tourists and begin to count the cost of the holiday company’s demise on already-battered economies.

About 50,000 holidaymakers are stranded in Greece, 21,000 in Turkey, 15,000 in Cyprus and 4,500 in Tunisia. Thousands of tourists are also stuck in the US and dozens of other countries. Most of the tourists are from the UK with an estimated 150,000 people, followed by Germany with about 140,000 holidaymakers.

Many of Thomas Cook’s German subsidiaries have stopped trading, but at present the group’s German airline, Condor, is still operating. About 240,000 people are booked to return home on Condor flights, but the airline will not carry those who booked their trips via Thomas Cook. The situation in Germany could get worse if Condor fails in its attempt to secure a €200m (£176m) bridging loan from the German government.

Melisa Rodríguez, a Spanish politician and representative for Tenerife, said the collapse of Thomas Cook could hit the Spanish economy and the Canary Islands in particular. She demanded action from Spain’s caretaker government.

About 525 Thomas Cook flights, carrying mainly tourists, were due to fly into Spanish airports over the next 15 days, with about 70% on UK-Spanish routes. Rodríguez said 30,000 people were currently stranded on the Canary Islands, 3,000 on the Balearics.

She said the collapse could lead to the loss of thousands of Spanish jobs as vast swaths of the economy on Spanish islands were directly dependent on Thomas Cook package deals. Rodríguez said 4 million people travelled to the Canary Islands with Thomas Cook every year and hundreds of hotel operators could go under if they were not paid or paid late as a result of Thomas Cook’s insolvency.

Greek ministers called a cabinet meeting in Athens on Monday to discuss the financial impact of Thomas Cook’s collapse. “The priority right now is the repatriation of the company’s customers,” Grigoris Tasios, who heads the Hellenic Hoteliers Federation, told the Guardian. “But we’re talking about an economic disaster with first estimates pointing to losses of at least €300m.”

Thomas Cook was the biggest UK holiday operator in Greece, sending 3 million visitors a year to the islands and employing 1,000 people on the ground. Almost 50 Greek hotels have franchise agreements with Thomas Cook.

On Crete, where 20,000 passengers are believed to have been marooned, tourism officials likened the company’s collapse to a massive earthquake that would reverberate through the economy. “It’s a seven-richter earthquake and we are expecting a tsunami,” said Michalis Vlatakis, president of Crete’s travel bureaux and travel agents. “It’s not only the contracts of the visitors who have come and are now lost, it’s all those contracts that won’t materialise because people who were expected to come up until 10 November simply won’t travel.”

Turkish officials said thousands of hotel jobs could be at risk unless another operator stepped in to partner with Turkish hotel chains.

“Some hotels worked solely for Thomas Cook,” said Osman Ayik, the president of the Turkish Hoteliers Federation. “Many hotels will suffer difficulties.” He said some Turkish hotel owners still had not received cash owed from tour operators that went bust long ago. “If something similar happens with Thomas Cook then hoteliers could go bankrupt.”

In Tunisia, the country’s tourism minister, René Trabelsi, said hotels were owed about €60m from Thomas Cook for stays in July and August. “I will have a meeting on Tuesday with the British embassy in Tunisia and the hotel owners to see how debt could be redeemed,” he said.