Britain’s Monarch Airlines ceased operations on Monday, forcing the authorities to initiate their biggest-ever peacetime repatriation effort to bring back tens of thousands of travellers stranded overseas.
Monarch became the UK’s largest carrier to go
into administration, cancelling about 300,000
future bookings.
The British government has asked the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to charter more than 30 aircraft to bring back to the UK about 110,000 Monarch customers currently overseas, the CAA said.
Tough competition has been pressuring European airlines and driving consolidation, with Air Berlin and Alitalia filing for insolvency this year and seeking new investors for parts of their businesses.
“Mounting cost pressures and increasingly competitive market conditions in the European short-haul market have contributed to the Monarch Group experiencing a sustained period of trading losses,” said Blair Nimmo, a partner at KPMG and a joint administrator of Monarch Airlines ltd and Monarch Travel Group ltd.