The front page of Seguro Holidays' summer edition brochure proudly boasts that 2008 is its 10th anniversary flying from Prestwick Airport in Ayrshire.
The front page of Seguro Holidays' summer edition brochure proudly boasts that 2008 is its 10th anniversary flying from Prestwick Airport in Ayrshire.
However, after a summer dominated by the credit crunch and high fuel costs, it is clearly not a time for celebration for the company after it yesterday announced that it had ceased trading.
Seguro Holidays entered Britain's highly competitive travel market in 1991 when it began consolidating flights with self-catering properties and hotels from a telesales office in Edenbridge, Kent.
The company opened a second office in Macclesfield, Cheshire in 1997.
It chartered its first flight from Prestwick to Majorca the following year after identifying a big gap in the Scottish market for fully serviced package holidays and built its reputation using the policy slogan: The price you see is the price you pay.
Customers were offered "great budget holidays", no flight or fuel supplements, the benefit of flying from a local airport, and trans- fers to booked accommodation and representative services.
The company appeared to flourish under the stewardship of directors Rachel Elliott and Richard Burke and relocated a reservations call centre from Macclesfield to Prestwick in 2005.
The move followed the tragic deaths of two of its customers the previous year in Gran Canaria. They were among 56 people, including a holiday rep and the driver, who were on a coach when it crashed on a downhill stretch of road between Puerto Rico and Puerto de Mogan.
The victims had flown out the night before from Prestwick with Seguro.
The company was to endure a summer of discontent in 2007 after hundreds of its customers suffered a series of delays of up to four days after its only plane was grounded on more than one occasion.
Seguro later terminated its agreement to charter planes from Greece-based airlines Sky Wings after one of its planes suffered major technical problems twice in a fortnight.
British Midland Airways took over all Seguro flights from September 27 that year until the end of the season in October with remaining flights provided by Futura Airlines, which Seguro ironically blamed yesterday for its collapse.
In the past year Seguro became Prestwick's largest charter tour operator, flying 70,000 passengers to the Algarve, Benidorm, Gran Canaria, Lanzarote, Majorca and Tenerife.
Mark Brock, associate director with Barrhead Travel, said it had 300 customers abroad with Seguro and about 3000 booked to go before the end of next March.
He said the firm had set up a dedicated customer helpdesk and was working with other major tour operators to secure additional holidays for Seguro customers. The number is 0141 242 8598.
