Airline industry lays on extra flights for stranded Flyglobespan travellers

Passengers left stranded by the collapse of the airline Flyglobespan are all expected to arrive home by Christmas after the airline industry mounted an emergency operation to repatriate thousands of holidaymakers.
The small Scottish airline and tour operator collapsed late on Wednesday, leaving 4,500 holidaymakers stranded in Spain, Portugal, Cyprus and Egypt or waiting for holiday flights from British airports.
Airlines including Ryanair and easyJet offered discount fares and laid on extra aircraft to fly many back to the UK. Administrators appointed to close down Globespan announced today that they had laid off 550 employees, including pilots and aircrew, without any redundancy pay, and were keeping 100 staff on to help wind up its operations.
Scores more Globespan employees in India, the Middle East and Ascension Island were also left overseas but are now being repatriated. Nearly 60 staff in Delhi have been given free flights home by Virgin, while an Italian airline has temporarily taken over "air bridge" flights for the Ministry of Defence for British troops based in the Falkland islands.
As attention shifted to the cause of Globespan's collapse, the administrator, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), confirmed it was also investigating why a "significant" amount of money from credit card bookings, thought to be between £30m and £35m, had not been paid to Globespan. The sum held back by payment processing firm E-Clear is thought to be about double that needed to cover sums which must now be paid out to credit card customers whose flights never took off.
17/12/09 Severin Carrell and Simon Bowers/Guardian.co.uk, UK

To Read the News in full at Source, Click the Headline

Categories: Foreign Dec 2009