A gran says she spent five days held in a windowless room after losing her passport in the airport and being detained by Spanish immigration.
Tracy McKellar was travelling from the UK, which she does fortnightly, to her home in La Coronada, in the Extremadura province of western Spain on May 20.
When the 53-year-old lost her passport, she spoke to customer service employees who contacted border control officers.
But the gran says she was astounded at the treatment she received after she was detained for days in Madrid with no change of clothes or access to her phone, the Mirror reports.
The live-in carer, from the Wirral, Merseyside, was led to a windowless room after being interviewed and waited for days until she could board the next flight to Liverpool.
She said her nightmare could "happen to anyone".
Tracy told the Daily Mail: "I ran to customer services to ask them to search the plane, but they were in no hurry to look. I was worried that the plane would take off with my passport, but they didn't seem to care."
Luckily Tracy had time to contact her daughter and explain the situation as she spent five hours trying to locate her passport before she was led to an immigration room and had her phone confiscated.
Despite Ryanair staff searching the plane for her passport, it was not discovered.
Tracy claimed border control said as she is no longer an EU citizen "they could only help me so much".
She had to wait five days for a flight back to the UK after being told she needed to fly back to the same airport with Ryanair.
Tracy said: "I begged them to let me fly to any airport at all, but they wouldn't let me. I was given a social worker who phoned the British consulate, but they said they couldn't do anything because 'it was the weekend'. I was stunned."
She passed her time trying to teach English to some of the 30 other people also forced to wait in a windowless room.
She did not have any clean clothes and had to wash her one set every night, hanging them out to try the next day.
"It was very distressing at first but I knew there was nothing I could do, so I remained as calm as possible. But you could see how other people were really upset," Tracy explained.
At one point a young man who gave her the "creeps" put his face near hers as she lay on her bunk and said "Ola! Are you sleeping well!"
After swearing at him, she asked the social worker to keep her away from him. Tracy was given a book to read - about a woman in prison - as the TV was broken.
When she was allowed out of the immigration room, she suffered a "humiliating" exchange as the accompanying police had to ask the pilot for permission to fly her home.
Tracy still has no passport and when she finally got home, she lay on her daughter's lawn and slept for two hours.
A Ryanair spokesperson told the Mirror: "The crew on this flight from Liverpool to Madrid (20 May) searched the aircraft for this passenger's lost passport, but it was not there.
"Any passenger travelling to Spain from a country outside the Schengen area must go through Passport Control, which is managed by the local authorities.
"While we regret this passenger's circumstance, it is beyond our control and is now a matter for the local Spanish authorities."
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