About 85,000 travellers stranded abroad, 200,000 holding useless airline tickets, 1,700 people whose jobs have disappeared and the UK’s third-biggest tour operator in administration. A good day for the travel industry, then.

XL’s sudden collapse brought misery to passengers and prompted frantic phone calls from British tourists stuck in Florida and the Mediterranean. But away from the emotion, industry experts concluded that sanity had returned to an unreal market bloated by oversupply.