This week in: featuring Jet2.com, Lunn Poly, Owners Abroad, Atba and more

• announced three ex-Manchester routes for next summer, to Kos, Venice and Gran Canaria, creating 250 jobs. It was the first time Manchester passengers could fly direct to Kos or Venice.

• Children's ‘pester power' was revealed as a key influence on where families went on holiday in an exclusive survey commissioned by and featured on Travel Weekly's front page.

• Insurance to back up financial protection for package holidaymakers was reported to have cost £9.45 million in the first year of the (APC). The number of overseas trips made by UK residents fell 8% year on year to 64.6 million for the 12 months to May, according to ONS figures. And blamed swine flu for a £12.6 million loss of profit for the nine months to the end of June.

• Owners Abroad announced it was scrapping all its main brands except upmarket Sovereign, and rebranding itself . It said the Owners Abroad name would disappear from summer 1995, along with mainstream brand Enterprise, while Twentys and Sunmed would also go, with product merged into new non-family brand Freespirit. The company was aiming to lift its market share by one percentage point to 13% by summer 1995.

• Thomson revealed that was accounting for more than half of its summer 1995 sales. The higher-than-normal figure was due to rival retailers discounting Thomson's holidays by only 5%, compared with 15% off others, because of the operator's refusal to increase agency commissions.

• Thomas Cook bought Barclays Bank's traveller cheque subsidiary .

• new code of conduct, due to be published in the next couple of months, was expected to clamp down on tour operators' freedom to cancel a holiday after final balances have been paid.

• In what was thought to be the first prosecution of an airline in the UK for overbooking, was fined £250 plus £20 costs. The case, under the Trade Descriptions Act, came from a passenger's complaint he was offloaded from a London-Bermuda flight last year.

• On the Letters page, P F Russell, branch manager of in Heswall, Cheshire, asked if agents or GPs should stock vaccination forms for smallpox or cholera after a client was sent to him for a form by his GP. "Just who should keep these mystical documents?” the letter asked.