ALERT: All UK’s Monarch Airlines Flights Cancelled, As Airline Dissolves (October 2, 2017)
Monday, October 2, 2017
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All,
More than 110,000 customers of the United Kingdom’s Monarch Airlines are stranded abroad today after the airline financially collapsed and cancelled all of its flights at 3 a.m. local time. All flights from the UK, including some 300,000 future bookings, have been cancelled and will not be rescheduled. Passengers are encouraged to visit monarch.caa.co.uk, or call the helpline on 0300 303 2800 if calling from the UK or +44 1753 330330 from abroad, reported the Daily Mail.
According to the CNN/Money:
Monarch had been under enormous financial pressure from rising costs, low demand on some routes because of terrorism fears, as well as a drop in the value of the pound, according to accounting firm KPMG.
About 110,000 U.K.-based Monarch customers are stranded overseas and need to be brought back. The biggest airline collapse in U.K. history also affects 750,000 people booked on future flights or holidays.
The New York Times reports:
Monarch Airlines, a struggling British low-cost carrier and tour operator, collapsed into bankruptcy early Monday, ceasing its flights and forcing the government to step in and bring home more than 100,000 passengers stranded abroad.
Britain’s aviation regulator called the collapse of Monarch the “biggest ever U.K. airline failure.” The airline is one of many that have struggled to grapple with Europe’s highly competitive airline market.
Just this year, the Italian carrier Alitalia went into administration, which is similar to bankruptcy protection in the United States, and is currently seeking a buyer. Air Berlin, a German low-cost carrier, filed for insolvency and has put its assets up for sale.
Ryanair, an Irish discount airline, has expressed interest in making a bid for Alitalia’s assets, but it has faced its own public backlash after it was forced to cancel more than 1,000 flights in September and October because of mistakes in its handling of vacation time for pilots. Last week, Ryanair said it would cancel an additional 18,000 flights on 34 routes between November and March to avoid further cancellations.
For Monarch, “mounting cost pressures and increasingly competitive market conditions in the European short-haul market” led to “a sustained period of trading losses,” Blair Nimmo, a partner at the accounting firm KPMG, which is acting as administrator for company, said in a news release.
Monarch’s problems have been building for some time.
Terrorist attacks in Egypt and Tunisia and unrest in Turkey dented demand for tourism to those destinations, weighing on the carrier’s results. That forced the airline to rely more on routes to popular vacation spots in southern Europe, such as Spain, where it faced stiff competition.
Monarch was founded in 1968 and operated flights to 40 destinations from Britain, as well as providing tour packages. It employed about 2,750 people, according to the company’s website.
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