Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Monday the 30th of January and it's about 60 hours since we learnt that Flybee Mark 2 had gone out of business. I want to talk about why it happened and I want to talk about what your rights are if you're one of

the passengers who was disadvantaged by this. Just for the background, Fly B Mark I, which had had a

pretty illustrious 41 year history shut down at the start of March 2020, just before the COVID pandemic.

And indeed, the first travel business to mention their failure was partly due to the COVID problems,

which of course, caused so much devastation to aviation.

But actually, the problems ran much, much deeper.

They burnt through £100 million of shareholders' money. so much devastation to aviation. But actually the problems ran much, much deeper. They

burnt through £100 million of shareholders' money in a year. And so therefore they were

not going anywhere apart from oblivion. Everybody, including me, was extremely surprised when

they came back in April 2022.

Now, to create any kind of regional UK airline during a COVID crisis,

when all the good routes that Fly B had had, as well as the many bad routes that they had,

had been swallowed up by other airlines, was, my goodness me.

Well, I think the Spanish have a term for it, which is Cojones.

What could they be thinking?

Since then, I've been looking at some of the numbers.

We know that they, in their first month, had a load factor above 60%,

but that has been below 60% ever since,

and they've been kind of struggling to fill half the seats on their planes.

I know for a fact that their fares have been very low

because I've bought a few when trains were looking too expensive.

Not something I enjoy doing, but if you're paying half as much to fly as you would be to catch the train,

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