And the irony is that deutesch bank is on the verge of collapse.

zbobserver, I'm not aware of any such extra restriction on the ATOL and indeed if that were the case one would expect all flights to be ATOL protected, which I don't believe is the case for flight only inbound to UK flights for example.

If you buy an airline these days you look at its EBITDAR. If it's OK then you may make money, but only if the balance sheet has sufficient cash to ride several 10s of £m either side of what your business plan forecasts (100s of £m for national carrier size airlines). Changes in fuel price, exchange rates and market conditions can easily mean you have a rough ride.

As an investor you need deep pockets and faith in the company if you are going to reap the rewards over the longer term. The 737 MAX 8 deal with Boeing should further improve Monarch's finances very significantly, but of course it has to get to the point where the maintentenance and fuel saving costs feed through to build the balance sheet, and in the mean time finance will have to be raised.

You cannot buy an airline and not put in a sufficient cash buffer and expect to ride out even normal cyclical changes, let alone those seen recently. Easy and FR for example ride out such cycles all the time, but nobody notices as their cash reserves are more than adequate for the nature of the business in hand.

As with any business, ultimately cash is king.

Monarch scheduled flights booked on their website are Atol protected, and they issue an Atol certificate. I've just flown Monarch and one of the flights was only booked a few weeks prior, and yes I got Atol certificates for all of them.

Monarch bookings done via Avro used to be for charter flights, but Monarch no longer operate any charter flights. Now Avro is just an advertising platform for shonky OTAs to advertise on.

There is some right old :mad: being posted I this thread. If you don't know, keep your gob shut.

Oh and it's EBITDA no R. As in earnings before interest,tax, and non cash items depreciation and amortisation. It's a measure of cash generated, not profit.

There certainly is. You could always Google it. The R (for "Rent" of aircraft) takes in the cost of leases.

From Wiki:

Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization, and restructuring or rent costs (EBITDAR) is a non-GAAP metric that can be used to evaluate a company's financial performance.

EBITDAR = revenue – expenses (excluding tax, interest, depreciation, amortization and rent costs)

EBITDAR can be of use when comparing two companies in the same industry with different structure of their assets. For example, consider two nursing home companies: one company rents its nursing homes and the other owns its homes and thus does not pay rent but instead has to make capital expenditures that are not necessarily of the same order of magnitude as the depreciation. By looking at EBITDAR, one can compare the efficiency of the companies' operations, without regard to the structure of their assets.

Some companies use an EBITDAR where "R" indicates "Rinel Costs". While this analysis of profits before restructuring costs is also helpful, such a metric should better be termed 'adjusted EBITDA'.

Related to EBITDAR is "EBITDAL", "rent costs" being replaced by "lease costs".

So it's actually more relevant to airlines as it is a benchmark regardless of whether the airline leases or owns its aircraft, or does a combination of the two.

I have flown Monarch back in day of the 757 and A300 many times between Manchester and Alicante. Always booked through AVRO. They were just the usual charter airline and never thought anything great or outstanding about them. Nowadays, I would never consider booking a flight with them. Think times have changed and better deals can be had and I find jet2 holidays hard to beat. I think that's their problem. People see them as old and expensive and to a certain extent legacy. Just my opinion.

It's in very few peoples interest to not at least extend the deadline if that's required.

If monarch bring in e.g. The Chinese gorilla , this episode will soon be a distant memory and monarch could flourish .

I do find it telling that greybull haven't coughed up and avoided this weeks nightmare .

But it's before rental . Ebitdar allows you to compare airlines that operating lease aircraft vs airlines that finance lease, debt finance or just own the fleet .

I.e. 2 airlines both make £10m ebitda , but one pays operating leases of 6m, the other has borrowed money to buy them and the interest cost is obviously excluded from ebitda . The 10m figure is misleading as in one airline it includes the fleet , but in the other excludes .

On checking alicante flight arrivals half an hour ago for to day I have noticed the mystery ghost flights up against the monarch flights United airline flight numbers one against gatwick and this strange one cancelled from Tenerife but all the rest of the monarch flights running as normal?

Lotus1: Are you getting this info from FR24? If so, take no notice. I don't know where they get their info from but, if you look across the board at these United flights, they appear to be utilising Quantum physics, flying from one airport to another then departing a 3rd airport without making the inbound flight to the 3rd airport. Incidentally, N116UA is currently over southern France, heading for Hahn. ALC arrivals show UA2295 due in from PMI in the next 5 minutes. Except it hasn't flown anywhere yet. Similarly, UA2294 is due in from Manchester soon. That makes 2 UA flights expected at ALC, yet one of the 2 is en route to Hahn. Incidentally, both United 744s were booked into LGW yesterday and that didn't happen.

The United 747 was sat down in TFS yesterday. Guessing the crew are enjoying their European break at the expense of the CAA.

Ivan aromer
Rhein Main? I doubt it. It closed in Dec 2005. Ramstein is the only AMC base now. HHN does accept military traffic.

The CAA are really flexing their muscles with this whole saga! Putting the whole Titan fleet, much of Air Tanker and the US stuff on standby at CAA expense is a real statement of intent. Someone must have really pissed them off! I guess the ATOL renewal time is their only opportunity to assert themselves as regulator.

The next hour may hold news (12 noon)...we'll see...

It's all lovely having an armada of foreign aircraft on standby should the worst happen. But would it not be a better use of resources to simply call in the charters if/when Monarch goes the way of the Dodo?

At worst you'll need to wait a day or so and your only expense would be extra nights in hotels, not the expense of large aircraft flying half way around the the world 'just in case'.

The ATOL protecrion scheme is a finite resource. It should be reserved and not squandered on jollies for dozens of air crews and air craft.

Indeed, it does seem strange.

I can't help but wonder if the CAA has reservations about other another ATOL holder or even holders due for renewal too. It's a lot of capacity, even just for ferrying Monarch's passengers.

Only the civvy-regged ones, one would assume? One of which has been sat around at BHX quite a bit recently AFAIK.

I agree but this is a real statement of intent from the CAA to make a big point! There's more to this than meets the eye I feel!

The CAAs job shouldnot be to make a point. Millions should not be wasted to make a point. It's vital money that should be spent wisely. As a country we are lucky to have the protection and therefore every effort should be made to protect the money in the pot.

I have everything crossed for Monarch. However we had the Sunday night saga and today there seem to be aircraft joining those already on standby. Did any of the charters go back after being stood down or am I correct in thinking that most are still in Europe and have been joined by English airlines today?

Reluctantly, I think we should all be prepared for the worst.

The CAA clearly cannot win. If an airline folds (heavens forbid), leaving thousands of passengers stranded abroad and repatriation aircraft are not readily available to act fast, the CAA would be in the firing line for mismanaging the situation and failing to deliver on its ATOL duty. I don't think it has anything to do with the CAA flexing its muscles. Personally, I feel encouraged that the CAA has taken a proactive approach on this, in an effort meet one of its primary purposes; to protect consumers.

From my reliable source the CAA are trying to make a point with Monarch but more likely Greybull and unfortunately Monarch is caught in the middle.

Given the worry that ?Monarch is putting its customers through (and staff), it clearly couldn't give a monkeys .

I can't see why it takes this long to get an extension

I should imagine the investors are trying to get away with pumping as little money in as possible. GreyBull will have lots of cash in the bank however will likely want to risk as little of that as possible. Perhaps they know something we don't.

Bookings must be very low now - is deadline midnight ?

We have no idea of what is going on behind closed doors so yes Greybull and all parties involved obviously know lots we don't! My hunch is they will sell all or part of Monarch to a much larger investor who has long term ambitions for the airline. Greybull were only ever in it short term.

Actually booking are holding up!

FANS - On the new Luton to Stockholm route, there was a pop-up which said "0 bookings made in the last 6 days', which has now disappeared. Extreme, but indicative of the network as a whole?

Tweets from MON have changed tone in last 15 mins. Now stopped saying all operating as normal to replies such as "we'll update you as soon as we can" and "we'll DM you". They need to clear this up fast.

If this airline does go down the pan I think it will be partly because of social media and press speculation. Even if things don't go t**s up for ZB, please consider what all the speculation etc is doing to forward bookings.

Some on this site and other would seem to be pleased if and when ZB fail, I can't imagine why. Please think of the staff, customers and everyone this will have a knoc-on effect on if ZB fail.

Well said!

I couldn't agree more.

I disagree that it's social media that's caused it. Monarch has been terminally ill for a long time. It's currently having its dressings changed for the Nth time. Wether it survives or not is anyone's guess.

There's never smoke without fire. Sunday night's incident was not a fleet of cruise or hajj charters positioning into place that caused the problem. It was symptomatic of the problems at MON. Before the days of social media people would be blissfully unaware. Now is a time for planning next years holiday. Hard working families could potentially be risking thousands of their hard earned pounds and could be throwing them down the drain. The working man and woman is responsible only to their families and their bank accounts, not the employees or shareholders in Greybull.

Let's not forget Phill was saying that all was hunky dory the day before XL went bust. And didn't he then go on to front several other travel firms that went under taking thousands of hard working people's money with them?

https://www.theguardian.com/business...ckage-holidays


"Luton-based airline has until midnight to show it has enough funds to keep flying for three months, a condition of Atol award"

Sadly the simple truth is my friends who work at Monarch are expecting to hear any news from Social media first before anything officially internally.

No they haven't. Stock answer is still "we will announce details as soon as we can, but please be assured flights are operating as normal" or "We will update customers as soon as we can, and all of our flights are running as normal".

'there's no smoke without fire'

Doesn't mean that people on this board should fuel that fire though, after all, we are all in the same industry. Whatever happened to having each others backs?

Twitter team just replied to someone saying Manchester to dalaman on Monday has 78 spare seats.

I know turkey hasn't been selling but speaking to crew from another airline there flights have been going out nearly full.

Just hope this is a one off and other flights are full