It is terrible news about XL, an airline that I always liked. But one statement that did come out of the CAA spokesman, when asked about the stability of other carriers, was that well founded and strong airlines, like Easyjet and Ryanair, were probably the least exposed to the current crisis.

A slight surprise, but re-assurring for those of us that fly into Faro regularly.

Because of the way it is structured, I suspect that Monarch probably comes into this group as well. I hope so.

I hope Monarch does too, Bruce. More often than not we have flown to Faro with Monarch. Indeed, our flights in December are with them. I was a whisker away from booking next years' Turkey flights with XL but Sharen wasn't too keen on the Thursday take-off so I held back . . . Good job I did!

It has been chaos at our office today. As we are an airport car park, we had people not arriving back at all, people arriving back days early because they managed to bag a flight with thomsons (at vastly inflated prices) and people ringing up to cancel future bookings and demanding full refunds! and those we had managed to switch their bookings to another date/operator.

XL have never been our favourite airline as the vast majority of their flights from and to Manchester could be relied upon to be delayed.

As Bruce and Micheal say, lets hope Monarch are okay because most of our faro flights are with them. Rumour has it that Alitalia are in trouble though.

Oh and to top it all the Hurricane in Cuba didn't help the chaos
I'm going to drink a bottle of wine now

tricky wrote:...and people ringing up to cancel future bookings and demanding full refunds!

I guess this could equally apply to Villa owners, hotels etc.

I'd like to think that all such businesses will be sympathetic to the poor folks whose holiday has been whipped out from under them.

You could argue that that's what insurance is for, but are all these costs covered by standard holiday insurance ?
[edit: having posted, I just read this]

We are very sympathetic Richard, but it costs us in admin charges to book people in (credit card/debit charges, which we don't pass on)
etc. We only charge a minimal cancellation charge to cover this and not at all if they can give us alternative dates.
They can claim from their insurance companies for this cost, and if they haven't got insurance - more fool them. We are a business at the end of the day, and consumers ourselves.

I would suspect that business's like Trickys will probably have alot more grief as part of the knock on, I doubt if they will see much profit from it, especially if they suffer cancellations as well

Please don't get me wrong. I am not suggesting that Tricky, or any other company who will suffer loss as a result of refunded cancellations should do anything more than their normal trading practices.

I was actually aiming my question more at say private Villa owners who have a much more flexible business model and MAY well recover any such losses by re-letting for example. If any other related businesses can find similar flexibility, without impairing their profits, then this is the time to be creative, and not greedy.