Originally Posted by
ATNotts
TUI the tour operator cancel these flight generally, it has always been thus. Book your holiday in August for next year, then around January, if booking aren't adequate find yourself consolidated onto a flight to the same destination, from another airport, or offered a refund / rebooking somewhere else.
Same procedure for all tour operators, however with the vertical integration of the IT industry, it's often difficult for the average punter to differentiate between what the airline does, and what the tour operator (with whom they are contracted) does since they appear to be one and the same.
Cancelling a flight, or consolidating, 6 months in advance is a little different to rerouting to a different destination on the day or 40 hour delays.
That isn’t me being anti-TUI either - although I think they could have dealt with these delays and rerouting better (a family friend was delayed from STN and moved to LGW with little communication and it was SH) and some of the lengths of the delays are unacceptable it is clear that most of these issues have the max grounding as the root cause.
I think this is definitely a summer to forget for TUI but they’re likely to claw quite a lot back from Boeing I suspect (and backed up from Boeing’s statement)