So here is my story:
The other day I got an email from "MyTravel news updates" or something which I signed up for at some point, probably by accident because they usually hide the option of not recieving their news under the little "Continue" button. Anyway, I got this update which interested me moderately; nothing spectacular you understand, but moderately. For the purposes of expanding this little update and my knowledge of the situation, I logged on to
www.airtours.com. I did this because I still haven't memorized the address for MyTravel Group, and airtours.com redirects you there automatically. So after a small amount of time waiting, crying, hoping as the page loaded, my eyes did something like this:
I was amazed (
) to see in front of me a picture of an A330 in blue colors with "Airtours" written on it, and clouds and "Group Home" posted. Yes chums you guessed it it was Airtours Group plc homepage. Now there hasn't been an Airtours Group plc homepage since February when the name changed and "MyTravel" was put up everywhere.
But this is the clincher. This is where it really gets interesting so wake up, no sleeping whilst PPRuNing: Airtours had a site that they put up in 2001, and then before that (probably around 1999) they had a different one with a different layout. The one I came across was THE 1999/2000 ONE!!!! (That's the very old one for those who zoned out in my previous explanation) It said "Statistics: group name, Airtours" on the front and I was at this point quite confused.
I thought to myself, maybe its just in some internet memory bank of my computer, but then I thought, memory banks don't go back 2 years (or more); just to be sure I cleaned up the disk, and still, there it was. It was completely working, all the links worked. Interestingly enough the stock ticker on the side said "MyTravel" though. Even the downloads worked, I downloaded the 2 available yearly reports, from '99 and '00.
So then I went to the now-memorized
www.mytravelgroup.com page, and what do you think? The Airtours page came up.
I quickly saved to my computer all the pages as keepsakes.
My question is, how is it that a page from two years ago (or more) from a company that has now been renamed, and their third website incarnation back, can suddenly come up on the computer?
Is it some kind of joke?
Is it a previous chairman getting his own back at a group of directors who changed his company into a daft name?
It is worth mentioning that this was at about 10:00pm EST, so about 3:00am in Britain.
Probably thought no one was up . . . didn't think about the American connection. Thought they could have their little joke did they?
Can anybody explain this in a rational way?
Addendum: The following day the MyTravel page came back as normal.
(and PS if nobody believes me I can send them the pages I've got on my desktop)
SFly