The mayhem at UK airports has ruined Britons’ half-term vacations, with easyJet canceling more than 200 flights over the next ten days.
Passengers at Manchester Airport have characterized the service as ‘carnage,’ while at Gatwick Airport, a passenger experienced a five-hour wait before boarding an Easyjet aircraft, which was later cancelled.
‘Carnage at Manchester Airport this morning,’ Rob Scott wrote on Facebook. ‘Terminal two is packed, with long lines and major delays caused by luggage not being put onto aircraft owing to personnel shortages.’
Jimtheboy tweeted: ‘Utter carnage at terminal one at Manchester Airport today. Baggage conveyors broken, hardly any staff, no organisation… total shambles.’
Elsewhere, entrepreneur Oliver Bruce and his friend Harry Bethell drove from Cheltenham to Gatwick yesterday to board a flight to Monaco for the F1 over the weekend.
He said: ‘It’s something we’ve always wanted to do. We got to the airport at 2pm yesterday but the flight kept getting pushed back from its initial call time.’
Eventually, the gates opened and by 8.25pm, passengers had boarded the plane -only to then to be ordered to disembark.
Mr Bruce said: ‘We were all told to leave due to “cabin crew working over their allotted time”.
‘I asked the man on front desk, “is it likely to fly or do I need to find alternative options: and he said “I have spoke to the captain and he’s 99.9% sure we will fly.”‘
Shortly afterwards, passengers were sent an email informing them the flight had indeed been cancelled.
Mr Bruce and Mr Bethell waited at the airport until 11pm before they were eventually escorted back through passport control and drove back to Cheltenham.
He added: ‘It was a total disaster. Nobody was informed what to do, with the next flight being Monday… There was no apology, no explanation of where to go or how to get out of the airport.
‘I feel sorry for those wanting or needing to visit family, loved ones, sick relatives or go to weddings.’
In an announcement yesterday, Easyjet said its cancellations would affect about 24 flights per day from London’s Gatwick airport between May 28 and June 6.
It added the cancellations were ‘necessary to provide reliable services over this busy period’.
It comes after a software failure forced EasyJet to cancel around 200 flights on Thursday.
A spokeswoman for the company said in a statement: ‘We have taken the decision to make advance cancellations of around 24 Gatwick flights per day starting from May 28 until June 6.
‘We are very sorry for the late notice of some of these cancellations and inconvenience caused for customers booked on these flights, however we believe this is necessary to provide reliable services over this busy period.
‘Customers are being informed from Friday and provided with the option to rebook their flight or receive a refund and can apply for compensation in line with regulations.’
‘Over the next week we will be operating around 1,700 flights per day, with around a quarter of these operating to and from Gatwick.’
Yesterday, Liverpool FC supporters travelling to the Champions League final and families embarking on half-term getaways faced long queues at the Port of Dover and UK airports.
Thousands of fans descended on the Kent port on Friday to board cross-Channel ferries en route to Paris for Saturday’s match.
Airline passengers were also stuck in lengthy queues at airports such as Gatwick, Manchester, Stansted and Bristol.
There is also high demand for sailings from families embarking on trips to the continent for half-term.
The port advised passengers to ‘pack adequate supplies including food and water’ as it is expecting ‘a very busy week ahead’.
A mother has spoken of her ‘nightmare’ experience with easyJet after her flight to Tenerife was cancelled first at Manchester and then at Gatwick – leading to her family being forced to sleep on an airport floor, and treated like ‘animals’.
Nicola Caine, 37, from Cheshire, was due to fly from Manchester Airport to Tenerife on Monday in a group of 13 with her husband, children and several family members.
The group had booked a package holiday with easyJet to celebrate Ms Caine’s parents’ 40th wedding anniversary and their 60th birthdays.
They were booked on the EZY1903 easyJet flight to Tenerife South for a seven-day holiday, which cost around £2,500.
Ms Caine described how the experience was ‘one problem after another’, which was traumatising for her family, especially her 12-year-old son, who is autistic.
Her ordeal comes as airports in the UK are still trying to recover from Covid restrictions and are struggling to hire enough staff to meet surging demand while Britain faces a tight labour market with more vacancies than job-seekers.
After Ms Caine’s family group boarded their plane, the passengers waited over an hour due to baggage issues, only to be told that the flight was cancelled.
The mother-of-two, who is married to Dave, said: ‘We were sat on the plane for an hour and a half. A pilot came and said ‘unfortunately, due to staff going over their hours, we are going to have to cancel this flight’.
‘The reaction on the plane wasn’t good at all. My son broke down in tears and screamed the plane down.
‘Then we were told we couldn’t get off because an Emirates plane had just arrived, and they take priority. So we sat on the plane for another 30 minutes.
‘Luckily, the staff on the plane were really good – they let us go to the front of the plane to calm my son down.’
When they disembarked and arrived back in the terminal, Ms Caine said the passengers were not greeted by easyJet staff. Instead, Manchester Airport staff advised passengers to download the flight company’s app to rebook new flights.
But there were more issues with the easyJet app, Ms Caine claimed.
She continued: ‘Everyone was trying to get on the app, but it was crashing. No-one could get on it at all.
‘The app didn’t work because we were on a package holiday. While we were stood there, two cancelled easyJet flights came through from Turkey and Egypt.
‘So we were left, all these people from three flights, not knowing what would happen. Luckily, we live 30 minutes from the airport, so we decided to come home.
‘We didn’t know whether to unpack because we didn’t know whether we would be going on holiday or not.’
At 5:30am, Nicola received a text, telling her to be at Manchester Airport for 10:30am, where a coach would take them to Gatwick Airport to catch a flight to Tenerife at 7:10pm that evening.
‘We were absolutely devastated,’ she said. ‘We had not slept all night because my son was crying.
I just thought, how can I go on a coach for almost five hours and sit in an airport for three hours, and then go on a four-and-a-half hour flight? EasyJet said it was a suitable alternative and that we would lose our money if we didn’t go on that trip.’
After arriving at Gatwick Airport, Ms Caine quickly booked her son for an antigen test, as his PCR had run out.
At the gate, waiting to board the flight to Tenerife, the passengers had to wait over 30 minutes while the plane was cleaned. They were then told by easyJet that they could no longer operate the flight, but stand-by crew would be there for the flight in an hour.
They were then asked to return to departures, which raised alarm bells for Ms Caine, who suspected that the flight would be cancelled.
She said: ‘I questioned the staff because I knew this had happened the night before. They assured me that everything was fine.
‘But we had to go back to departures, which was a tell-tale sign that we wer
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