Passengers at Dublin Airport were left disgruntled after Aer Lingus cancelled 13 flights to and from Ireland on Sunday.
One passenger said he had already arrived at the airport three hours before his flight, anticipating long queues, only to receive a message from the airline saying his flight was cancelled.
Masters student Cameron Kelly told Dublin Live: "My flight was at 6:15pm to Amsterdam with my gate closing at 5:50pm.
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"Myself and three friends arrived at the airport at 2:35pm anticipating long queues. When we reached the self bag drop kiosks at 3:00pm and tried to weigh our bags, 'It is too late to drop a bag for this flight' appeared across the screen.
"We asked a customer service member of the Aer Lingus staff what that meant, and literally as we were speaking to him, we got a notification saying that our flight had been cancelled. So in total, exactly 3 hours before the flight was due to take off, we received a cancellation notice."
Cameron then received a notification from Aer Lingus shortly after saying he had been rebooked onto a flight on Tuesday. However, he then ran into further confusion as he queued with other passengers to change his flight.
He said: "From here, we were directed down to the opposite end of the terminal to arrange to be changed to another earlier flight if needed. We queued for about 25 minutes before a Dublin airport staff member told us that the line we were in was specifically only for arranging accommodation.
"People became disgruntled and began arguing with airport staff, stressing that their kids were tired at this point.
"We moved lines back down to the original side of the terminal only for there to be an announcement from Aer Lingus staff that there was "no point" in us standing in the line we were in, despite being directed there by airport staff because they were no longer rearranging flights at their desks because they didn't have the capacity to deal with the quantity of people in need of a rescheduled flight."
Cameron said they were then moved to the opposite end of the Terminal for a second time to arrange accommodation for the night and waited about 45 minutes to be seen.
He said on Sunday: "Right now, we're on a bus to the Gibson hotel for the night and may have to change hotels again tomorrow," he said.
"I'm currently a masters student and barman in The Hague, and I'm lucky that it is not a holiday that is being eaten into, but some people are very upset that their holidays are being taken up."
An Aer Lingus spokeswoman said: "Aer Lingus anticipated the return of demand for travel once Covid restrictions were removed and built appropriate buffers into our plans in order to deal with a reasonable level of additional disruption.
"This weekend, system pressures from ATC strikes, and ongoing issues at airports and among third party suppliers have regrettably necessitated the cancellation of some flights. This pressure on the system has been compounded by a spike in Covid cases among our own teams in the last number of days.
"Where cancellations have occurred, Aer Lingus has sought to re-accommodate disrupted passengers on the next available alternative service.
"Aer Lingus wishes to apologise to those customers that have been impacted, and has shared detail regarding customers’ rights the airlines’ obligations under Regulation (EC) 261/2004 which can be found here: www.aerlingus.com/support/legal/regulation."
The other Aer Lingus flights that were cancelled on Sunday, according to Dublin Airport's website, included the departing flights EI552 11:40am to Lyon, EI244 5:55pm to London Gatwick, EI610 6:15pm to Amsterdam, EI470 6:20pm to Split, EI182 7:00pm to London Heathrow and EI496 7:40pm to Faro.
While the following Aer Lingus flights arriving into Dublin Airport were also cancelled: EI165 from Heathrow, EI1779 from Izmir, EI609 from Amsterdam, EI527 from Paris CDG, EI245 from London Gatwick, EI611 from Amsterdam and the EI183 from Heathrow.
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