A Portslade travel agent and tour operator has gone into administration.
Holidays 4 U has ceased trading while 12,800 of its customers are on holiday in Turkey.
Assurances have been given that they will all be brought back to Britain even though they may not necessarily land at the right airport.
The operator, which also traded as Aegean Flights, ran out of money yesterday (Wednesday 3 August).
It ceased trading and called in the administrators – Ian Oakley-Smith and David Chubb – from PriceWaterhouseCoopers.
The parent company – Holidays 4 UK – also has a further 20,000 bookings, many of which will be for two passengers or more.
The administrators will be working as quickly as possible to meet their obligations as far as possible, not least after making most of the 18 staff redundant yesterday.
They said that the company – based in Gordon Mews, in Gordon Close, Portslade, behind the Station Road Tesco store – had an annual turnover of £35 million.
But they said that it had also been badly affected by the economic downturn in 2009 and last year.