Planet Business

LAURA SLATTERYlooks back at the week in business

€114 million

Size of Budget Travel’s bond at the Commission for Aviation Regulation – more than enough to cover the cost of getting 750 stranded holidaymakers home and the cost of refunding customers yet to travel, according to its managing director.

€140m

Box-office takings mopped up by teenage vampire sequel Twilight Saga: New Moonat its opening weekend in US cinemas, the third highest on record behind The Dark Knightand Spider-Man 3.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"It was the same group of people always being asked for money and they were very generous. And generally, to be honest, it is all the builders in Ireland who are getting a really hard time now - some of them very unjustly. They were really big contributors to all the charities in Ireland. Very generous."

– Ali Hewson, wife of Bono, claims developers are much misunderstood.

GOOD WEEK: Kabul real-estate agents

War is no barrier to nascent property bubbles in the capital of Afghanistan, where real-estate agents are reporting a boom in prices, which have risen 75 per cent in the past year. International agencies, having found some bricks and mortar not already in negative equity, are swooping and seizing the best-located real estate, while wealthy Afghans, their fingers burnt from plummeting Dubai property portfolios, are pouring cash back into the city.

BAD WEEK:easyJet

Proving it’s possible for an inflight magazine to cause offence through more than just its prices, easyJet has been forced to pulp 300,000 copies of easyJet Traveller. The seat-pocket publication’s editors thought it was a good idea to include an eight-page fashion spread of models leaning seductively against a series of pillars – pillars that were part of Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial. A spokeswoman admitted the photo shoot was “inappropriate and insensitive”.