Thomas Cook collapses, stranding 150k UK holidaymakers • Hacker News Board

Re: Thomas Cook collapses, stranding 150k UK holidaymakers

#271

Post by Silhouette » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 5:59 PM UTC

Symbiote wrote: post #209

Silhouette wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like that ought to be inflammatory and hyperbolic, but honestly, I was wondering the same thing myself last night. If you're the British government, and your citizens who are legitimately in a foreign country, travelling on valid passports and doing nothing wrong, are being forcibly detained, and if the local authorities are not stepping in to try to resolve the situation in some reasonable way, how do you t…

If this isn't resolved, staff from the British Embassy will show up, and the local police will probably think again — or be instructed by the national police or their government.

There was a vague reference to Embassy staff becoming involved in some way in at least one of the reports I read earlier today, but it wasn't clear exactly what happened.

Re: Thomas Cook collapses, stranding 150k UK holidaymakers

#272

Post by toyg » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 6:17 PM UTC

Someone wrote: post #261

toyg wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it depends on the sector. Big supermarkets, for example, pay later, as do a lot of businesses where actual turnaround of goods is involved; but service companies typically have a more flexible cashflow and can easily do 30 days. In Italy the situation was so bad that it was not uncommon to get 180 days from big accounts. The State set an awful example by allowing 12 months on its own bills, and often wouldn't pay…

Thank the EU. https://ec.europa.eu/growth/smes/support/late-payment_en : ”Main provisions of the Directive Public authorities have to pay for the goods and services that they procure within 30 days or, in very exceptional circumstances, within 60 days. Enterprises have to pay their invoices within 60 days, unless they expressly agree otherwise and provided it is not grossly unfair. Automatic entitlement to interest f…

Yeah, but apart from this, removing roaming charges, funding infrastructure, safeguarding working rights, cleaning up our rivers and beaches, and building the richest market on the planet, what did the EU ever do for us...?

Re: Thomas Cook collapses, stranding 150k UK holidaymakers

#273

Post by differentView » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 6:39 PM UTC

buboard wrote: post #101

PhilWright wrote: post #26

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…

This didn't come out of the blue. Thomas Cook is known to have problems for years and an impending collapse has been rumoured since months ago. Why did all these traveleres choose them is a better question

Because vast majority of people aren't aware of the financial health of the companies they purchase from.

Re: Thomas Cook collapses, stranding 150k UK holidaymakers

#274

Post by hinkley » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 7:01 PM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #194

tpmx wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suddenly Google's ad profits make a lot more sense.

When I worked in this field (and I must stress that this is 15 years out of date anecdata), my impression was that Google's profits came from a mix of a large influx of naive new users, and established companies with misaligned incentives. 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…

Percentage wouldn't necessarily be so bad, except that there's a certain base cost to setting up and running all of those systems. At some point getting someone to up their spending 10% has very little incremental cost. It would be far cheaper than trying to reduce overhead.

So now you have perverse incentives on perverse incentives.

And if you don't look at it too closely then you can feel good about all the money you're making helping people slowly self destruct. Your parasitism is perfectly justified by the mad stacks of cash you're making.

There's only two ways to get that much money. Do something really really good (at which point you probably will give a lot of that money away), or do something really really bad. If your company has to talk about 'evil', it's probably in the latter camp and always has been.

Re: Thomas Cook collapses, stranding 150k UK holidaymakers

#275

Post by ValentineC » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 7:08 PM UTC

freshfey wrote: post #85

2rsf wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what happens if they declare bankruptcy on you way back ? and what about hotel reservations or the more expensive flight you'll have to take ? BTW Norwegian are fine for a while https://simpleflying.com/norwegian-bond-payments-deferrednor...

The hotel reservation problem actually happened to me. I booked the hotel via a company called AMOMA, which Google recommended me when I entered the hotel name (it was the cheapest so I took it). They recently sent me an email saying that they immediately ceased service and our booking will probably be cancelled. I checked with the hotel the same day and got a confirmation that the booking is all good (via phone and…

> I did pay via (prepaid) credit card so it'll be interesting to see whether I'll ever get my money back...

Curious: what card is both "prepaid" and a credit card?

Re: Thomas Cook collapses, stranding 150k UK holidaymakers

#276

Post by celticninja » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 7:16 PM UTC

adventured wrote: post #258

celticninja wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As examples please see Elizabeth Holmes/Theranos or Adam Neumann/WeWork neither of whom were Eton educated. I don't think it is an issue just with people educated in certain schools.

The school is quite important depending on the fraud being perpetrated. Holmes doesn't get nearly so far without the Stanford (or equivalent) tag on every propaganda puff piece the media wrote to promote her. Elizabeth Holmes, genius dropout of Marshall University - it just doesn't raise a billion dollars in venture capital quite the same way (even with her connections to people like Draper). She was sold as the next…

Both of them achieved their inflated valuation through a cult of personality of the leader. That's the same thing we see with Trump and BoJo in the UK

Re: Thomas Cook collapses, stranding 150k UK holidaymakers

#277

Post by Brian_K_White » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 7:22 PM UTC

intuitionist wrote: post #232

mcv wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And from what I understand, those are exactly the skills they teach you at schools like Eton. Well, maybe not being tall, but certainly the other ones. 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.

As basketball analysts like to say, you can’t teach height.

You can teach the appearance, use, and effect of height.

It's dumb that people are picking on that word out of the overall comment like it was some kind of mistake. The comment was about the nature of the appearance of competence, and height is one element that has an effect on how people perceive another person, and there are countless teachable things about that.

Re: Thomas Cook collapses, stranding 150k UK holidaymakers

#278

Post by heeen2 » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 7:30 PM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #212

gmueckl wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So how many times have each of the search engines been sued?

Plenty of times. Have you ever seen a notice from Google referencing chillingeffects.org at the end of your search results?

Re: Thomas Cook collapses, stranding 150k UK holidaymakers

#279

Post by buboard » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 9:07 PM UTC

differentView wrote: post #273

buboard wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This didn't come out of the blue. Thomas Cook is known to have problems for years and an impending collapse has been rumoured since months ago. Why did all these traveleres choose them is a better question

Because vast majority of people aren't aware of the financial health of the companies they purchase from.

it was in the news though, for more than a year

Re: Thomas Cook collapses, stranding 150k UK holidaymakers

#280

Post by hinkley » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 9:14 PM UTC

csomar wrote: post #86

mhandley wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't hotels realise this is a reputation business? In the age of the Internet, no-one with access to TripAdvisor or Google will ever stay there again. Wouldn't be at all surprised to see the hotel change name in the next year, if they survive. But perhaps worse that that, a hotel behaving like this, and not being slapped down hard by the Tunisian authorities, will damage the entire Tunisian tourism industry, just as…

> Wouldn't be at all surprised to see the hotel change name in the next year, if they survive. It won't change its name. The reason they are still in business is that they are so dirt cheap. They are known in the area and avoided by almost everybody except for these "tours" and the uninformed. > But perhaps worse that that, a hotel behaving like this, and not being slapped down hard by the Tunisian authorities, will…

Anonymity works great until you inspire someone with the time and means to make it their hobby to inform others about your existence.

Holding someone "hostage" like that, can be a pretty stressful event for anybody. You put some claustrophobic people into that situation and we've escalated things to traumatized. A traumatized person could easily blow this up into vendetta.