ANOTHER family missed their flights home and were forced to spend nearly £2,000 due to massive airport queues abroad.
Matthew Wilson, his wife and their son were travelling home to Manchester from Milan back in April.
They were returning to the UK after a nine-night holiday when they got stuck huge passport queues due to the new European entry rules.
Talking to the iPaper, Matthew said that despite easily getting through security, they were then stuck in another queues for 90 minutes, in which they only moved about 10m in that time.
Frustratingly, he family were then told by ground staff that their luggage had been removed from the plane as the flight was going to depart while they still stuck in the queue.
They were then forced to wait three hours before easyJet, who the family were flying with, offered the family a flight back home – but this was six days later than the original flight.
Rather than waiting, Matthew spent £1,969 on new flights from Barcelona, taxis, food and accommodation.
This was on top of the money they had already paid on the flight they missed which had cost £377.
Not only that, but their travel insurance provider also said they were unable to recuperate his costs.
Matthew said: “It was very stressful – we will think twice before travelling in Europe again.”
The airport operator apologised, adding that EES “requires more complex operations than before and longer processing times”.
Not only that, but it said that on the day the Wilsons were due to fly home (April 12), there were malfunctions at the automatic gates due to issues connecting to the border systems.
This resulted in “particularly long waiting times” as passengers had to be manually checked at passport control.
The Wilsons weren’t the only ones to miss their flight on this day – in fact 100 easyJet passengers were left behind in Milan Linate Airport.
The flight to Manchester had been held for nearly an hour “but it had to then depart due to crew reaching their safety regulated operating hours”, explained easyJet.
There have been warnings over wait times because of EES – and it’s only set to get worse.
Rafael Schvartzman – the vice-president for Europe at the International Air Transport Association (Iata) – warned queue times could stretch to as much as six hours this summer.
Mr Schvartzman said: “What we are seeing is a very hard risk of really challenging times or waiting times, talking about expectations of three, four, five, six hours which is unacceptable.
“We know for a fact there are many cases where people have lost flights or their connectivity.”