Wed, 18 Nov 2020 | ADMINISTRATION
The parent company of UK-based ski business VIP Ski has announced that it has entered administration due to the impact of COVID-19 and government-issued travel restrictions. Parent company APS-Select Ltd said that the company, which has been operating for 30 years, would cease trading with immediate effect.
The company catered to the higher end of the ski holiday market, offering holidays in France and Austria. It owned and operated 60 chalets in the Alps across 10 different resorts. The firm held an Atol license to carry slightly over 8,000 passengers per year, largely from March to May.
A statement from the company read: “Despite the wonderful support of our guests, colleagues and partners, we have been unable to navigate the extraordinary challenges of managing a winter ski operator through the current COVID crisis. We are sorry to announce VIP SKI has ceased trading today.”
Mark Supperstone and Simon Jagger from ReSolve Advisory have been appointed as joint administrators for the company.
The company has also issued information for customers who have booked for next winter or who are owed money. Package customers are protected by Atol, non-flight or accommodation customers are protected by ABTOT or their credit/debit card issuer while direct customers who paid with credit or debit card will need to claim a refund from their card issuer.
VIP Ski Managing Director Andy Sturt said in a blog post: “Since the day that COVID was added to our lexicon we have tried desperately to wrestle a path through incoherent, inconsistent and sometimes deeply unhelpful government guidance on refunds and travel restrictions, a patchwork of European lockdowns, flight cancellations and a complete and absolute lack of specific government support for our sector.”
“Despite the support of our guests and many of our partners, it has proved impossible to navigate a way through this. Without a sea change in booking behaviour, for which I can see no reasonable expectation in the short term, I cannot in good faith continue to trade and put our colleagues, guests, landlords and partners through the absolute chaos, personal misery and additional financial loss that would ultimately occur were our failure to happen in the middle of the ski season.”
The ski industry arguably avoided the worst of the COVID-19 crisis at the outset of the pandemic, which only impacted the end of the European season. However, many customers would have to have been refunded in March as the season came to a more abrupt end than usual.
Analysts have suggested that the difficulty of selling holidays for this season, combined with the need to refund customers who do book and then see trips prohibited as travel restrictions come in, could see many ski operators fall into administration.
In August, Ski Weekends, one of the UK’s leading operators, entered administration. The company was unable to raise the necessary funding to refund all cancelled customer trips. Similar to VIP Ski’s Andy Sturt, Ski Weekends MD Dan Fox said his firm had “been failed by all the government schemes.”
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