And yet, this is still isn’t as bad as it gets, not even close. The first-quarter figures only include a week of lockdown so imagine what the following quarter will look like with April, May and June lumped in together?
No wonder Stroll says he’s keeping his financing options open. Having tapped shareholders for a total of £536m last month, there is the very real possibility that further funds will be needed in the coming months.
Stroll chose his moment carefully, swooping when the carmaker had run out of options. Fast forward a few weeks and it looks like spectacularly unfortunate timing. Good job he’s in it for the long haul.
Viva la glamping
Goodbye all-inclusives, hello glamping on the South Downs. The package holiday is dead. Who wants to queue up for half an hour to eat the same food 14 days running anyway? All while trying to avoid the couple that you drunkenly made friends with at last night’s belly dancing show.
After posting €846m (£749m) of losses in the first half of 2020, Tui has added to the travel industry bloodbath with 8,000 job cuts, taking the number announced by the big beasts to nearly 35,000 since the start of month. Once Airbus faces up to a world where it sells considerably fewer planes, many thousands more are likely.
One sympathises with Michael O’Leary when he dismisses the new quarantine measures as nonsense, but he’s displaying all the usual bluster when he says passengers will ignore them. The restrictions will force many people – including this writer – to cancel their summer holidays.
Tui boss Fritz Joussen sounds like he has a better measure of where things are heading. His diagnosis that travel will change permanently seems sound enough. So, too, a prediction that tour operators will have to “reinvent holidays” as people stay closer to home.