LONDON (Reuters) – Britain\u2019s Monarch Airlines collapsed on Monday, causing the cancellation of hundreds of thousands of holidays, after falling victim to intense competition for flights and a weaker pound.<\/p>\n

The failure of Monarch, the largest British airline to go bust, will affect nearly 900,000 passengers in total. It marooned more than 100,000 tourists abroad, prompting what was billed as the country\u2019s biggest peacetime repatriation effort.<\/p>\n

Its demise added to turbulence in the European airline industry after Air Berlin and Alitalia filed for insolvency this year. Ryanair has also been forced to cancel thousands of flights because of problems finding enough pilots to fly them.<\/p>\n

Shares of Monarch rivals, easyJet, Ryanair and Wizz Air rose on Monday on the prospect of reduced competition and the chance to acquire some of its assets.<\/p>\n

Monarch, based at Luton Airport north of London and in business since 1968, cancelled about 750,000 future bookings and apologized to customers and staff.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am so sorry that thousands now face a cancelled holiday or trip, possible delays getting home and huge inconvenience as a result of our failure,\u201d Monarch Chief Executive Andrew Swaffield said in a message to employees after the company went into administration.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am truly sorry that it has ended like this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nearly 90 percent of Monarch\u2019s 2,100 employees were laid off on Monday, the joint administrators said.<\/p>\n

FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE LOGISTICS NEWS<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

Monarch\u2019s finances deteriorated in 2016 after security concerns deterred travel to Tunisia, Turkey and Egypt and brought increased capacity for routes to Iberia. The decline in the value of the pound has also compounded its problems.<\/p>\n

The airline was bailed out by its owner Greybull Capital a year ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cMonarch has really been a victim of a price war in the Mediterranean,\u201d Transport Secretary Chris Grayling told Sky News.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

LONDON (Reuters) – Britain\u2019s Monarch Airlines collapsed on Monday, causing the cancellation of hundreds of thousands of holidays, after falling victim to intense competition for flights and a weaker pound. The failure of Monarch, the largest British airline to go bust, will affect nearly 900,000 passengers in total. It marooned more than 100,000 tourists abroad,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":4274,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,2,10,47],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4270"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4270"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4275,"href":"http:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4270\/revisions\/4275"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moovafrica.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}