Furious easyJet customers claim they've been put up in horror hotels after their flights were cancelled at the last minute.
Scores of disgruntled would-be passengers are raging at the budget airline after it announced plans on Monday to cancel hundreds of flights from now until September.
Those caught up in the early cancellations claim they had to battle to find somewhere to stay overnight after their planes were grounded with little notice.
One unhappy flyer, Daha, alleged they had been trying to head back to the UK from Turkey when their flight was cancelled, leading them to be placed in a hotel.
"Put in an absolute monstrosity of a hotel for the night, full of bed bugs and cockroaches, and now getting no answer after constant ringing for days," they wrote on Twitter.
Have you been impacted by the cancellations? Email webtravel@reachplc.com
Another customer, Clare, claimed they were due to return to Liverpool from Larnaca in Cyprus only to find themselves in a "horrendous" hotel when their flight was also grounded.
"One star if that. I arrived 2am, I didn't sleep a wink. With cockroaches, room was dirty the bed was awful. This isn't the way to treat paying customers," they tweeted.
The airline has cancelled 1,700 summer flights in July, August and September, many of them from its main UK base Gatwick, impacting 180,000 passengers.
Rather than cancelling services at the last minute as has happened at points so far this summer, easyJet is pre-emptively moving flights around.
While 95% of customers impacted by the changes have already been put on another flight, around 9,000 are currently without a replacement.
A spokesperson for easyJet said: "We always look to take care of our customers during times of disruption and work with a hotel provider to secure overnight hotel accommodation and meals for those customers who need them.
"Should any customers secure their own accommodation or other expenses, we will reimburse them.
"We are sorry if this accommodation fell below the standards expected for these customers and so we are reaching out to them so we can look into this with our hotel provider.'
In regards to the cancellations, easyJet has said that all airlines make adjustments to their schedules, and that it has "consolidated a small number" of its daily 1,800 flights over the remainder of summer.
The 1,700 changed flights is from a total of 90,000 over the summer period. On Saturday alone, easyJet grounded more than 40 flights to and from Gatwick, affecting more than 6,000 passengers.
The airline says the cancellations are not due to pilot or crew shortages, claiming it is fully staffed with more employees working on its planes than ever before.
EasyJet has blamed the air traffic controller situation across Europe for the delays, with the threat of widespread strikes and reduced air capacity due to the war in Ukraine squeezing schedules.
Gatwick has been worst impacted by the changes due to it being easyJet's largest airport base and where it operates a quarter of its fleet.
“We are currently operating up to around 1,800 flights and carrying around 250,000 customers per day with more crew and pilots flying than ever before and like all airlines, we review our flights on an ongoing basis," the spokesperson for easyJet continued.
"As Eurocontrol has stated, the whole industry is seeing challenging conditions this summer with more constrained air space due to the war in Ukraine resulting in unprecedented ATC delays, as well as further potential ATC strike action."
