191–200 of 285 posts
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British travel agents that belong to ABTA, the national association, should have emergencies like this covered by insurance, so the money is there. This is basically the nightmare scenario for a travel agent so you would think ABTA has an emergency process all set up and ready to go.
There is ATOL protection but there's only approx £18 million in the fund. £200 million is needed to pay everyone out.
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There are also old companies who manage to keep up and innovate, and care about competence. Not as much as tiny startups, but enough to survive and do well. One problem with the British upperclass, is that they tend to be educated at private schools like Eton, where they primarily learn confidence. So tons of British politicians and managers know how to appear to know what they're doing, without actually knowing what…
>One problem with the British upperclass, is that they tend to be educated at private schools like Eton, where they primarily learn confidence. Not limited to the British upper class. It's astounding how far someone can go in life by simply being confident, charismatic, and articulate (and tall) despite being completely full of shit.
I think the world would do well to try to inoculate itself against this sort of superficial confidence. It's way too effective, with frequently harmful results.
I guess as they've gone bust I can tell this story now ... I used to consult for Thomas Cook about 15 years ago, and they were a basketcase of a company even back them, so this doesn't surprise me. I feel sorry for all the reps and workers out in the field and on the planes who will lose their jobs because of the profligacy of the Peterborough head office. Two examples of stupidity stick with me. One was that at the…
As one who specialises in enterprise SEO. That is still an issue with many businesses, websites are still seen as just an electronic version of a poster on a bill board, its gradually changing. And Eu companies are even worse, a few years back I suggested a link from a German parents website to the uk subsidiary and was told the Head office lawyers where checking to see if they "where allowed" to add a link.
So while involving lawyers every time is definitely high on the CYA scale, it may make sense to run some instances by a lawyer to be safe(er). The subsidiary's website shouldn't generally be much of a problem, though.
I guess as they've gone bust I can tell this story now ... I used to consult for Thomas Cook about 15 years ago, and they were a basketcase of a company even back them, so this doesn't surprise me. I feel sorry for all the reps and workers out in the field and on the planes who will lose their jobs because of the profligacy of the Peterborough head office. Two examples of stupidity stick with me. One was that at the…
Suddenly Google's ad profits make a lot more sense.
By "misaligned incentives", I mean that we were rewarded with a % of ad spend. This is very common model in the old advertising industry, and AdWords was treated as adverts, not as a technology proposition. Of course this meant that we had very little financial incentive to reduce the ad spend.
A more aligned structure would have been to reward percentage of profits, but companies were reluctant to reveal their profit margins to a third party, and third parties couldn't trust their clients to report this data correctly anyway. Hence percentage of ad spend was what everyone used.
Reminder again to never hold gift cards. I had a family member who was gited a $3,000 travel voucher with an agency - I told them to exchange it in for flights asap as you can book up to a year out, change the tickets later and it's better to be a creditor with a national airline than a likely-going-out-of-business-because-of-online travel agency
> Reminder again to never hold gift cards. $3,000 is no small amount of money, do people really feel so much shame in giving someone plain old money that they have to buy a gift card? A gift card is almost like buying a stock, except it's much more risky and gives you zero benefits compared to the cash that paid for it. If you want someone to be able to travel for $3,000 just give them $3,000.
Voluntarily spending £3k on a gift card seems utterly insane. I imagine a lot of people would feel quite confused or upset about that considering what they could also spend a few grand on.
Why do these travel companies always go bust in a way that leaves people stranded? Surely the management must have known a week or two ago that the company was about to go under. In that case, stop anyone flying out but still bring people back. By the time they actually cease trading there should be few people left abroad. Some managers in Thomas Cook must have known that people flying out were going to end up strand…
The moment they stop accepting reservations for new travel outbound is the moment they are commercially dead. Agreed, if you knew there was 0% hope (say, of flying anyone back a week hence) it would be unethical to keep it going. But if you were trying to keep things afloat and thought you could do, it would be unethical to do otherwise, since stopping new outbounds would 100% doom the firm and strand the overseas tr…
If the answer is “close to zero”, we need to rethink this privilege.
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As one who specialises in enterprise SEO. That is still an issue with many businesses, websites are still seen as just an electronic version of a poster on a bill board, its gradually changing. And Eu companies are even worse, a few years back I suggested a link from a German parents website to the uk subsidiary and was told the Head office lawyers where checking to see if they "where allowed" to add a link.
In German law, if you add a link to another site somewhere on your own site, you take responsibility for the content on the site you link you. You are required to check for that or face liability. This the result of years of court cases around this matter. And courts don't usually understand much about the web, let alone tech in general. So while involving lawyers every time is definitely high on the CYA scale, it ma…
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I was trying to figure this out too, other reputable sources cite 600k as well. There is some number of passengers who have not yet left on their trip, who are part of that number.
I'm wondering how one gets stranded before leaving on a trip (and that group makes up 75% of stranded people) It's 150k UK vs. 600k total holidaymakers.
Booking holidays often means scheduling time off work, around children's school holidays, when prices are reasonable, etc. Not always a trivial task.
Having those plans abruptly cancelled in this manner where they need to not only get a refund for any money paid, but to also try and make alternative arrangements on their own and cover any difference in cost out of their own pocket is effectively leaving them stranded in a sense.
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Exactly, they should have stopped flying people out when they were within two weeks of closing. If they had secured the funding needed to continue then all well and good and then start flying people out again.
Welcome to Hacker News! Lots of startups have gotten to within two weeks of closing, and then didn't close.
Why do these travel companies always go bust in a way that leaves people stranded? Surely the management must have known a week or two ago that the company was about to go under. In that case, stop anyone flying out but still bring people back. By the time they actually cease trading there should be few people left abroad. Some managers in Thomas Cook must have known that people flying out were going to end up strand…
Completely playing devil's advocate - continuing to operate whilst knowing there is a high risk of them going bust gives the CAA more time to put in contingency plans, rather than going bust _now_.
But I doubt they’re happy about that experience.