Holidaymakers were left vomiting and fainting in a queue from hell at Milan airport.
Around 100 easyJet customers were stranded at Linate airport on Sunday because of delays caused by new border checks in the EU.
The airline said the chaos was ‘outside of our control’ and even delayed takeoff by 52 minutes to try to give passengers extra time to get on board.
Dozens of Britons were left scrambling to find alternative journeys home after some only discovered they had missed their flight once it had taken off without them.
One passenger, Kiera, 17, said that only 30 people made it onto the plane while 100 didn’t.
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The Oldham local, who faced a 20-hour wait for an alternative flight, told the BBC: ‘We got here at 7.30am for our flight at 11am so were super early.
‘We got to Border Control and it was a massive queue of people. I wasn’t feeling great anyway because I think I’d got food poisoning.
‘At about 10.50am they brought some water over for people, and when we got to the front of the queue someone asked us if we were going to Manchester, and told us our flight had just gone.’
The new return journey had cost her mother £520 and that they would be going to Gatwick, not Manchester.
Kiera said easyJet had only offered £12.25 in compensation.
Adam Lomas, 33, an accountant from Wakefield, became stranded with his wife Katy, 31, and their four-month-old daughter.
The dad was sat in the airport for hours and when he tried to contact easyJet he was faced with ‘chatbots’ and ‘audio issues’.
He told the BBC: ‘The airport and easyJet have spent hours arguing with each other about who is to blame.’
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Adam said his family were forced to find a new hotel and book flights back to London, before then needing to get a two-and-a-half-hour train to Manchester.
EasyJet called the delays caused by the EU’s new Entry/Exit System (EES) ‘unacceptable’.
The new system requires passengers from third-party countries, including the UK, to have their fingerprints and photographs taken as they enter the Schengen Area.
EES registration is replacing the system of manually stamping passports and the UK government warned it might take longer for passengers to complete.
The system became fully operational on April 10 and caused travel chaos across last weekend.
Crime & Courts Correspondent
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