The speculations about JAL’s trials have been very intense in the last months. Although some representatives of the Japanese Government say that the airline could recover in two years, although the analysts say that this seems like a very optimistic goal.

Japan Airlines stock price collapsed in the last days, losing more than 90 percent of its value. This morning, the shares of the company were trading at just $0,04 per share, a record low. JAL’s market value is now just $120 million, below the price of just one new Boeing 787 jet.

Once the proud of the country, Japan Airlines was set up in 1951 with a several leased aircraft and it grew into a corporate giant with almost 50,000 staff and a fleet of 280 planes. JAL continued to refuse to cut the costs and the investments ever since the first signs of Japan’s economic bubble collapse, in the early 1990s.

Flyglobespan was Scotland’s biggest airline, carrying more than 1.5mil passengers, on 12,000 flights in 2008. The main departures city were Edinburgh, Glasgow Prestwick and Aberdeen. The company had also several transatlantic flights from Gatwick and Blefast.

Yesterday’s announce stranded 4,500 passengers in Spain, Portugal, Cyprus and Egypt, although the  PricewaterhouseCoopers administrators declared that all the booked passengers were contacted. The Civil Aviation Authority is running an operation for repatriating about 1,100 of the abandoned customers. If the rest of the people booked their flights on the Flyglobespan website or at the call center, they may qualify for a reduced fare back home.

“I urge all affected passengers to identify themselves as former Flyglobespan customers to alternative carriers in order to ensure they benefit from these special repatriation fares”, said the Transport minister, Paul Clark.

easyJet and Ryanair offered special “rescue” rates to the affected passengers, where the routes overlapped with those of Flyglobespan.  The 100,000 people that have travel plans booked should be protected under the credit card transaction or their personal travel insurance.

Flyglobespan went into administration after failed efforts of signing a financing deal with the Jersey-based Halycon Investments.

Indeed, according to The Budapest Business Journal “The low-cost Budapest-based airline company WizzAir recorded group-level losses of 9.5m in the business year ended in March 2009”.

SkyEurope’s remake?

According to the Czech online paper Napi Gazdaság, the company never managed to post profits over the five years of its operation, and has now accumulated losses of €78 million.

The article adds that“at the same time, WizzAir has spectacularly increased the number of its passengers.” Here I think this is not a very good indicator to understand Wizzair situation. Indeed, SkyEurope was also increasing its passenger traffic several months before its end.

More strange, Wizzair manager has always declared that his company is profitable. More information will come soon I think, for now this is quite surprising.

More than half of holidays are booked independently by the traveler, avoiding travel agency, but getting exposed to the risk of insolvency. Over 50 lowcost and regular airlines worldwide have collapsed over the past year, leaving thousands of customers stranded or facing losses.

Several travel insurance plans, such as M&S Money’s annual policy, already cover such failure. But BIBA’s Protect insurance goes beyond and offers insurance against car rental companies, airlines, hotels and even theme parks that go bankrupt when the customer has already paid for the service.