Rumours that bids for the beleaguered BlueSky Travel Systems business would only be accepted before 5pm BST today are apparently wide of the mark.
The cut-off date appeared rather hurried as the company only officially went into administration last week, on September 30.
Administrator MCR has confirmed how many bids have been received “so far” and also remarked that any technology company or investor that wanted to put a proposal together for BlueSky needn’t panic at missing what was supposedly an official deadline.
Tnooz revealed last Friday (October 2) that one bid had already arrived at the administrators. It is now known that “three or four” additional bids have been submitted.
When asked when MCR would be likely to close the bidding war, given that the process could hardly continue forever, a representative said bids would still be welcomed for a period of time until the most suitable (ie highest) was found.
This, of course, might indicate that none of the current bids have matched the requirements of the administrators.
What is one bidding for and what happens next?
The successful bidder will probably end up with the IPR for iTour and a handful of customers, generating some revenue from annual maintenance and/or transaction fees. But the customer list appears to exclude Thomas Cook.
So, how much revenue can iTour generate and at what cost of ongoing support and development? And if Thomas Cook has already recruited key staff, who is left to maintain the product?
There are scores of solutions chasing too few customers and iTour has to compete with all of them, including established players like Anite and Comtec. It will be interesting to see how this ends.