Two brothers are facing a £50,000 bill and have been banned for life from any Jet2 flight. The travel giant claimed their violent behaviour on board a flight to Crete caused the plane to have to be diverted.
This meant over 200 passengers were left stranded in Crete for an extra day as the plane couldn't make the return flight from the Greek island back to London on the same day. Jet2 said it was left needing to put passengers up in hotels due to exceeding their operating hours due to the diversion.
The airline said Alfie and Kenneth Springthorpe displayed "unacceptable levels of aggression and even physical violence" on their flight from London Stanstead to Crete, reported The Mirror. The crew was forced to head to Corfu so the pair from Sidcup, South East London, could be offloaded.
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The flight was left stuck in Corfu for three hours 45 minutes before continuing on to Heraklion Airport. The holiday company had to then provide overnight hotel accommodation, transport to and from Heraklion Airport, as well as food and drink, for the passengers waiting for their flight back to the UK.
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.”
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