It’s been one of those weeks when the usual steady flow of news in the travel industry became a deluge.
It started with the long-awaited Medhotels VAT ruling. Then we had the failure of On Holiday Group. And this week Ryanair announced its return to a GDS.
Sprinkle in the departures of Virgin Holidays managing director Amanda Wills and marketing director Andrew Shelton and the Travel Weekly news team has been kept on its toes.
It’s always tempting to see periods like this as representing a moment of great significance in the travel sector after which nothing will ever be the same again.
An industry with no Holiday Brokers and Steve Endacott; Virgin Holidays without Amanda Wills; and Ryanair being nice to agents – surely nothing will ever be the same again!
Or will it? Another breaking story this week was easyJet choosing Hotelopia as its new partner for the holidays section of its website.
Thinking this rang a bell I did a search on Travelweekly.co.uk for Hotelopia and there, from 2007, was a story about easyJet Holidays extolling the virtues of its Atol-protected packages.
Who was supplying the beds? You guessed it, Hotelopia, then owned by First Choice.
I’m not suggesting nothing ever changes, or indeed, that the news we pride ourselves on bringing you first isn’t significant.
But this industry has proved itself time and again to be resilient and capable of reinventing itself. As one door closes, another opens, and I’m sure we are all hoping that will be the case for those who lost their jobs with the demise of OHG.