Portions of ticket fees might be returned, he said, but recouping money from hotels — given their normally strict Ramadan booking policies and the short notice of the cancellation — was less likely.
"I would have been more strict with my guests in terms of booking with one travel agent versus booking on their own," she said, "because it would have led us to enjoy other incentives we did not have access to".
Was it just Shell's "technocratic hubris", as one manager called it, leading it to ignore the increasingly strict rules of America's Securities and Exchange Commission SECC) about booking reserves, without pausing to think about the consequences of, in effect, lying?
We hope to surmount this by skewing our questions away from the topical towards the philosophical - and also by the cunning ruse of booking my mates, who have strict instructions not to be smug.
OK, so it has only 23 covers and doesn't take bookings, a policy about which it is proudly strict.
