Firstgroup: Profit at Avanti West Coast owner beats expectations June 10, 2025 Transport giant Firstgroup has extended its share buyback program by £50m after annual revenue came in ahead of forecasts. The additional £50m buyback program follows Firstgroup’s return of £92m to shareholders in the 2025 financial year. The group also raised its dividend to 6.5p, up from 5.5p last year. The FTSE 250 company told markets [...]
Lanza-grotty? Hardly! Why Lanzarote is actually rather fabulous May 24, 2025 “David Cameron tucks into five-star hotel buffet in Lanzarote,” read a headline in The Mirror in 2016. Lingering over details like the then Prime Minister’s “all inclusive wrist band” and the resort’s “£230 a night price tag”, the newspaper’s clear implication was that Cameron was luxuriating in a paradise no ordinary Brit could aspire to. [...]
Saga CEO’s pay nears £2m as losses widen May 20, 2025 The chief executive of Saga, the insurance, travel and financial services giant, took home almost £2m for its latest financial year, it has been revealed. Mike Hazell has received a pay packet of almost £1.9m for the London-listed group’s year to 31 January, 2025, according to its annual report – his first full year in [...]
Art’otel London Hoxton, review: an unlikely Shoreditch icon May 18, 2025 Built on the site of a Hoxton pub that became synonymous with the Brit Art movement, the Art’otel Hoxton has some seriously big, trendy shoes to fill – and we think it’s met the challenge. Not content to hang art on the walls, the double-height atrium in the hotel’s foyer becomes the art. Edge-to-edge screens [...]
Italy, Call Me By Your Name style: staying at Luca Guadagnino’s hotel May 17, 2025 Every so often in films, carpets steal the spotlight. There’s the hypnotic hexagonal pattern in The Shining’s Overlook Hotel, The Dude’s Persian rug in The Big Lebowski, or the Kubrick-inspired flooring in The Substance. And no premiere is complete without the deep plush of a freshly vacuumed red carpet. At Palazzo Talìa in Rome, designed [...]
Why going all-inclusive in the Maldives gets the best of paradise May 6, 2025 Ruth Jessop was surprised when she feel for all-inclusive life in the Maldives I’m sitting on a tiny seaplane with twelve other people. We’re packed in tightly: there’s barely enough room to stand up, and most of us are knocking elbows with the other passengers, and jetlagged. The journey to the Maldives has been long [...]
Jet2 shares soar on £250m buyback and higher summer bookings April 29, 2025 Shares in Jet2 soared more than 15 per cent on Tuesday as the leisure travel firm reported healthy profit growth and unveiled a £250m share buyback programme. Group profit before foreign exchange revaluation and taxation is expected to come in at between £565m and £570m, an increase of around nine per cent year-on-year. Jet2 said [...]
Maradiva: Mauritius in five-star style April 29, 2025 It is rare that I feel an urge to return to a hotel – part of the joy of travel is to experience a place for the first time, after all. But I’ll make an exception for Maradiva, the five star resort in Mauritius where your dreams of borderline-pornographic beachfront perfection are dragged, startled and [...]
White Lotus fans climbed over rocks with bleeding feet to break onto set, says hotel manager April 19, 2025 It’s a story as wild as a plot from the show: during the filming of The White Lotus season 3 in Thailand, two female fans walked across jagged rocks with bleeding feet to break onto the beach of the hotel where the filming was taking place. The filming for The White Lotus season 3 took [...]
Teeth, tourism and hairlines: Is Turkey the future of British healthcare? April 19, 2025 As millions of Brits fly to Turkey for medical treatments each year, Amber Murray visits Istanbul to find an industry getting a lucrative makeover Everyone at the exit of Istanbul airport is well aware most people aren’t just arriving for a holiday. The process from plane to taxi to clinic is well streamlined: men holding [...]