routes only. Although ILG had justified this strategic shift by the new strategy's far greater rewards compared with the old one, some members among its senior management suspected that there was an ulterior motive to all this. It was well known among senior company insiders that several sets of exploratory talks had taken place at various times, involving ILG and British Airways, as well as ILG and American Airlines. ILG had also held similar talks with a number of other interested parties. These talks had centred on how to intensify those parties' co-operation with ILG/Air Europe, including proposals for a full-scale merger/takeover. This lack of being an asset-backed organisation with a high-risk strategy made lending money to ILG and its subsidiaries a far riskier proposition than lending to Davies and Newman Holdings, the parent company of Air Europe's ailing rival Dan-Air. Not only did Davies and Newman/Dan-Air actually own many of the aircraft in the ailing airline's fleet, which were mainly older, less efficient planes with a generally low re-sale value, but it also held the title to the freehold of a number of commercial properties, including prime real estate in the City of London. Moreover, Davies and Newman was the owner of Dan-Air Engineering, a sister company of the airline as well as the UK's second-biggest and one of the world's best-equipped aircraft engineering organisations at the time. These were the main reasons ILG's lenders, notably Lloyds Bank plc, which also had a substantial financial exposure to Davies and Newman, ultimately decided to pull the plug on the former rather than the latter, despite Air Europe being perceived as operationally far superior and financially stronger than Dan-Air by many of those who had no intimate knowledge of the true state of ILG's finances. This included many well-reputed industry analysts as well as seasoned observers. Legacy Unlike many of its contemporary charter airline rivals, as exemplified by Dan-Air, one of its chief rivals, Air Europe had made a name for itself by becoming a pioneer in offering genuinely enjoyable as well as affordable jet travel for the average holidaymaker, which decisively broke with the charter airline industry's "cheap but cheerful" image. Air Europe was also typical of the trend which dominated the British holiday market in the 1980s, with tour companies operating their own in-house airlines, which, although accruing considerable capital expense in the first instance, enabled these companies to