The passengers who took off from Paris on board the doomed Concorde flight yesterday were on their way to New York to start a 15-day cruise aboard the five-star luxury liner MS Deutschland. The German cruise operator Peter Deilmann Reederei, which owns the Deutschland, chartered the flight.
The 100 passengers were mostly German, but included two Danes, an Austrian and an American. The German tourists, who included three children, paid between u£3,500 and u£9,000 each for the cruise via Florida, the Bahamas and Cuba to the port of Manta in Ecuador. Mr Deilmann said last night that the liner had been due to leave from New York this morning with more than 500 people on board.
"We are deeply shocked here and I can only extend my deepest sympathy to the relatives. I know nothing about the circumstances apart from what I heard from the media," he said.
The German Chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schroder, expressed shock and sadness at the news and cancelled his official engagements last night as a gesture of respect for the dead. The German Foreign Ministry and the German embassy in Paris set up telephone hotlines for passengers' relatives within an hour of the crash.
Mr Deilmann was unable to say where the dead passengers came from, but he confirmed they were almost certainly German nationals. The passengers had flown to Paris from a number of German destinations to join the flight.
The crash came at the height of the German holiday season. Tour operators who have experienced difficulties in recent years were hoping Germany's economic recovery would result in a holiday boom, but yesterday's tragedy is likely to persuade many Germans who have not booked their vacation to holiday at home this year.
Dielmann is one of Germany's biggest cruise operators.
