travel

Kiss Flights (Flight Options) collapses into administration

August 18, 2010 in All posts

Following on from my other post about Sun4U, another UK travel operator has gone bust – this time it’s Flight Options (more commonly known as Kiss Flights). A quick look at the site shows there’s only a holding image on the homepage – but the Google cache reveals a bit more content.

For those of you who’ve been let down by them, here’s their contact details:

Reservations & Customer Services – telephone: 0871 737 4155

sales@kissflights.com
E-mail Sales with pre-booking enquiries, for quotes and group bookings, or setting up an account with us.

customerservices@kissflights.com
E-mail Customer Services with post-booking enquiries, to discuss amendments. General enquiries welcome.

As per my entry on Sun4U, here’s a critical look at their website:

  • No tracking code; there’s no code in the site to tell them how many visitors they were getting…how’re they supposed to measure ROI? No wonder they went bust…
  • Basic design; no crime here (unless you’re the style police), but come on – it hardly encourages me to part with my hard-earned money.
  • All content opens in a new window; If you visit http://www.kissflights.com//CustomerInfo.aspx, clicking on any of the left-nav items opens the content in a new window. Bizarre practice.

Bye bye, Kiss Flights.

Note: According to Wikipedia, Kiss Flights was sold to Flight Options Ltd in January 2009 following the collapse of XL Leisure Group. It was founded by Michael Smith and Paul Moss, who had previously worked at failed tour operator XL Airways which also went into administration in September 2008.

Perhaps it’s time for these people to stop running travel businesses?

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Sun4U go into administration

August 13, 2010 in All posts

Sun4U collapsed late on 11th August, stranding hundreds (BBC article explains a bit here). The website directs people to call ABTA for more info, and all looks lost.

To be honest though, looking at that website, I’d be VERY hesitant to trust them in the first place:

  • It looks like a dog’s dinner: this isn’t a crime in itself, but the homepage is a complete bombsite – bad Flash animations, little in the way of content, inconsistent wording/capitalisation…it just looks crap.
  • It’s been built entirely in Dreamweaver: again this isn’t a crime, but hardly the hallmark of an industry-standard website.
  • This is a 12-page site (including the homepage) – and the way it’s built means it’s very un-search-friendly…yet it has managed to become Pagerank 2 (I know PR supposedly doesn’t stand for a lot these days, but still)
  • Commented-out code: again, not a crime – but it’s for content that was from Easter….?
  • The Google Analytics tracking code is in the header: definitely not a crime, but it’s meant to go in the footer
  • No robots.txt

All in all, it looked like a bad idea from the outset in my opinion. Bye bye Sun4U.

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