The only thing worse than a canceled flight is having to shell out the dough to figure out your own accommodations. And that’s exactly the headache that families are dealing with after a rare system failure left nearly 2,000 flights to and from the UK canceled.
Many travelers found themselves stuck away from home and scrambling to make plans to return in a timely fashion -- and racking up some unexpected charges. Some families, like the Bakers, spoke to the BBC about the costs.
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Mark and Holly Baker, along with their two kids, got stuck in Majorca due to air traffic control’s technical difficulty. They said they were offered a return flight home and a hotel, but they wouldn’t be able to get home until a week later.
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But like so many of us, the family didn’t have a spare week to wait around -- the adults were due back at work and one of the kids started school. So the couple had to find a very alternate route to get home sooner.
The Bakers decided instead to take an overnight ferry to France, where they hoped to take three trains and another ferry to make it to Brighton in time to move on with their lives. All of this came out of the family’s pocket.
"I don't know if I'm going to get this money back. That's my worry," Mr. Baker told the BBC. He says that he’s keeping costs down because EasyJet’s guidelines stipulate that reimbursements need to be “reasonable”.
Another family that spoke with the BBC was the Ahmed family from London. Samina Ahmed is a school administrator with two school-age sons. The family of four (and a baby on the way) was stranded in Turkey, and couldn’t take the September 4 and 8 flights home offered because both she and her children were starting school sooner.
Ahmed said that she was nervous about booking a sooner flight out with another airline. Like the Baker family, she wasn’t sure if she would be reimbursed.
Another passenger, Rob Ward, told the BBC that he was more than £2,000 in the hole after his flight to London from Ibiza was canceled. The flight glitch has put a major slowdown on flights in general for the UK airspace -- National Air Traffic Services have switched to a manual system, meaning they’re handling fewer flights overall.
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