Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrugh! Gluck! Sob! Sigh! %^#@$$%%^& Zoom Airlines!
Ah now I feel better! Yesterday, the 28th of August I had tickets to fly to France, transport booked at the other end, a long term rental on a 17th Villa in the South of France. Today, the 29th of August everything but the airline tickets is in limbo. The reason you ask? Zoom airlines has gone bust and ceased all operations, our airline tickets are no more and most likely so is the money used to purchase them. It seems Zoom has been in financial trouble for a while but failed to let any of it’s customers know this, while it fiddled the creditors, for fear of losing business and getting into worse financial troubles. Instead it took bookings, took payments up front and kept schtum. Now when the creditors close in and force the issue, we have lost our flights and are so far down the list of creditors to be reimbursed that even the camel drivers and dog barkers will be paid first. I doubt we will see any reimbursement any time soon. So our plans to move to France, to the villa are for all intents and purposes finished. Checking the airlines booking web pages for other airlines has confirmed that replacement tickets (if we could afford them) would be about 4 times what we paid Zoom.

So it seems our plans to move to France will have to be delayed at least until the dust settles from the Zoom fiasco and airlines ticket prices return the absurd levels that we would consider normal. In the mean time we are faced with the daunting task of trying to get our money back from Zoom Airlines, deposits back from car rental agencies in France, deposits back from the owner of the Villa in France, cancel the house sale. It is just an incredible total mess and the worst part is the fact that it is out of our control. We are helpless, with no way to force Zoom to return our funds, even less influence to get a similar flight deal to France from another airline. Once again we are at the complete and utter mercy of bad timing and bad luck.

We will get it worked out in the end, we always do but at this moment it seems incredibly frustrating and aggravating.