Two brothers face a £50,000 bill and have been banned for life from flying with Jet2 after the company claims their violent behaviour on board a Crete-bound flight caused the plane to be diverted.
The knock-on affect of the delays meant over 200 passengers were left stranded in Crete for an extra day with Jet2 needing to put them up in hotels, the firm said in a press release.
Alfie and Kenneth Springthorpe displayed "unacceptable levels of aggression and even physical violence" on their holiday flight from London Stansted to Crete, the company said in an article on its website.
As a result, the crew was forced to head to Corfu so the pair, from Sidcup, Kent, could be offloaded.
This resulted in a delay of approximately three hours and 45 minutes before the flight continued safely to Heraklion Airport.
Following the delay, the air crew ran out of operating hours meaning that they were unable to operate the return flight from Crete.
This forced Jet2 to provide overnight hotel accommodation, transport to and from Heraklion Airport, as well as food and drink, for more than 200 people, the company said.
Jet2.com added it will now pursue the costs incurred by the diversion.
Managing director Phil Ward said: “The deplorable behaviour of these two passengers left our highly trained crew with no choice but to divert the aircraft to the nearest airport so that the police could offload them.
"This means that their actions directly impacted customers looking forward to enjoying their well-deserved holidays in Crete, as well as customers and crew who then had to stay in a hotel for an unwanted extra night.
"It is completely unacceptable that the pair caused such disruption for so many people and they must now face the consequences of their actions.
"As a family friendly airline, we take a zero-tolerance approach to such behaviour and we have a successful track record when it comes to pursuing and recovering any losses that we incur.
"We would of course also like to apologise to everyone impacted by this behaviour, which is thankfully very rare.
"Now that international travel has reopened properly, we hope this acts as a timely reminder that acting in a disruptive fashion can well lead to very serious consequences.”
Tourists are flooding back to Greece after the pandemic ground international travel to a halt. Millions of people in the country rely on the tourist industry to survive.
Revenues from this lucrative trade, in which one in four Greek people work, shrunk from €18.2bn in 2019 to €4bn in 2020. Many are now hoping 2022 will be a bumper year.
