Good morning! Assuming that Paul's airline didn't go bust, he should be back tomorrow.
On The Beach (LON:OTB)
- Share price: 395p (pre-open)
- No. of shares: 130.4 million
- Market cap: £515 million
Mentioning this story first of all because it's time-sensitive and relatively straightforward.
The Civil Aviation Authority has announced to the stock exchange that Monarch Airlines has ceased trading, and that 110,000 passengers are stranded overseas. 300,000 future bookings are cancelled. Those abroad "will be brought back to the UK at no cost to them". 30 aircraft are being chartered by the CAA and government.
This is the equivalent of operating, at very short notice, one of the UK's largest airlines.
So how does this affect the online travel retailer, On The Beach?
The Group has Scheduled Airline Failure Insurance in place which covers the failure of Monarch Airlines Ltd including monies paid to Monarch Airlines Ltd and also the costs to repatriate customers currently in resort. The Board anticipates that there will be a one-off exceptional cash cost associated with helping customers to organise alternative travel arrangements or providing refunds and will update shareholders in due course. The Group has no exposure to Monarch Holidays Ltd bookings as it only offered Monarch Airlines Ltd seat-only flight options on its website.
In short, I don't think this is a big deal for On The Beach.
The CAA website appears to have crashed under the pressure of everyone trying to work out what ATOL protection means, but the costs in my opinion will almost entirely be falling on the government, CAA, various insurance companies and then the passengers themselves. On The Beach is just a middleman, which sounds like it has protected itself from airline failure, and while this will be a messy episode, I suspect that it will have been forgotten about a year or two from now.
For someone who was already thinking about buying shares in On The Beach (LON:OTB), maybe today would be the day to do that?
Stanley Gibbons (LON:SGI)
- Share price: 8.125p (-13%)
- No. of shares: 179 million
- Market cap: £14.5 million
This collectibles company is drifting toward the £10 million level where we tend to…
