Yahoo Finance Monarch Airlines promoted seat sale just three days before collapse
Monarch Airlines sent out text messages advertising a seat sale just three days before it folded, it has emerged.
The message, sent on Friday, said it was offering super-cheap deals to Spain and Portugal – even though negotiations to keep the carrier in the air were going to the wire.
It said: “Hooray for payday! Find the feeling with 1000s of seats at £30 to Spain and Portugal.”
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By the early hours of Monday, the airline had collapsed, unable to find a buyer to carry it forward, leaving 110,000 customers stranded abroad.
It’s not known how many people took up Monarch on its £30 seat offer in the hours beforehand.
Financial Times personal finance editor Claer Barrett said the problem for the airline, the industry and customers was that if the Civil Aviation Authority watchdog had given any indication Monarch was in trouble, then potential flyers would have deserted it, sealing the airline’s fate.
“What’s particularly awful in this case is that so many of Monarch’s passengers picked the airline… because it was cheap,” she told BBC Radio 5Live.
“You’ve got people who have saved up for their only holiday of several years, for a wedding and their dreams have just been destroyed.”
The CAA’s repatriation of stranded Monarch customers has begun and will run for the next two weeks.
It is estimated that it will cost about £60m to fly holidaymakers home. On Monday, some 11,843 passengers were put on to 61 flights to return to the UK and a further 11,647 are due to return on Tuesday on 58 flights.
Andrew Swaffield, the airline’s chief executive, told BBC Radio 4 Today, that a decision to ground the fleet was taken on Saturday night when they estimated losses for 2018 would be “well over £100m”.
Some 1,900 jobs at the airline have been lost – from pilots and cabin crew to staff on the ground.
In a letter to staff, Swaffield blamed the fallout from terror attacks in the key markets of Egypt and Tunisia in 2015, plus political unrest in Turkey a year later, for crippling the airline.
He told the BBC: “The UK insolvency framework doesn’t allow airlines to continue flying unlike in Germany and Italy, where we see that Air Berlin and Alitalia continued when they were in administration.
“We tried to operate a normal schedule all day Sunday so we could be ready for the CAA rescue flights on Monday morning without causing a massive backlog.”
He said job fairs would be organised to try to ensure as many staff as possible found alternative roles with rival companies.
Administrators KPMG said, in total, 860,000 customers were caught up the collapse of Britain’s fifth largest airline.
Some 300,000 bookings over the coming months with Monarch will have been lost.
