Like thousands of others caught up in Monday’s air traffic control chaos, Swarna Khare is more than £1,000 out of pocket. However, she claims her case has been made substantially worse after she used an online agent to buy a last-minute replacement flight from Rome back to London – only to find that it appeared to have been massively oversold, denying her boarding for a second time.
The 35-year-old pharmaceutical executive from Woking had spent a week travelling around Italy and was scheduled to fly back from Rome with British Airways at 9pm on Monday evening. She first learned that the UK air traffic control system had crashed when a friend called her as she travelled to the airport. When BA later cancelled the flight, Khare says, she was one of hundreds of passengers left stranded, with no help offered by either the airline, or airport staff.
