From The Torygraph:
As many as 150,000 Thomas Cook passengers have been left stranded abroad awaiting repatriation after the travel giant ceased trading.
The company was unable to secure the extra £200 million needed to keep the business afloat following a full day of crucial talks with the major shareholder and creditors on Sunday, leaving thousands of travel plans in chaos.
This morning, the last Thomas Cook flights landed in the UK, with staff in tears and passengers coordinating a 'whip round' of donations. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said dozens of charter planes, from as far afield as Malaysia, had been hired to fly customers home free of charge and hundreds of people were working in call centres and at airports.
I really don't get it.
Thomas Cook (not sure which bits, the corporate structure is unclear to me) went bankrupt and the administrators pulled down the shutters. Sacked their staff, cancelled future flights etc.
This leaves lots of people who have to get home somehow. A lot of them ended up paying extortionate ticket prices to get home. This illustrates my point that a large part of airline ticket prices is pure rent. They could get away with it because of temporary scarcity. Thomas Cook's jets were parked somewhere, their slots left unused with all their pilots and crew out of work - while planes and crews "from as far afield as Malaysia" were being hired at huge cost. Why not use what's nearest to hand?
'Somebody' has to pay for the stranded passengers to get home. For the purposes of this discussion, it does not matter whether that is the passengers themselves, their holiday insurance companies, ATOL, the UK government. And that cost should be kept as low as possible.
My question is, why didn't the UK CAA or ATOL simply chip in for one or two week's operating costs, long enough to get everybody home? That would be a lot less hassle than sorting out a hundred thousand individual insurance/compensation claims (and "hundreds of [extra] people... working in call centres and at airports"). It would work out far cheaper for the 'somebody' who ends up footing the bill, that saving being equal and opposite to the super-profits/rents which surviving airlines have just collected, plus the reduction in admin and hassle for all concerned.