Family-of-six stranded in Egypt and £6,000 out of pocket after…

A family-of-six stranded in Egypt after their flight home was cancelled due to the air traffic control meltdown claim they have been forced to fork out a whopping £6,000 to keep them “off the streets” in their holiday resort. Lee and Emma travelled to Hurghada, Egypt with their four children, aged 15, 14, 12 and 8, on Saturday, August 12. As they waited for their taxi to the airport on Monday, August 28 – which was also Emma's 40th birthday – they checked their flight status to discover that their plane back to Manchester Airport had been delayed until the next day. Soon after, the Grimsby family then discovered their flight home had been cancelled altogether, leaving them stranded. They claim it wasn't until five minutes before their original flight time that they received an email from EasyJet to inform them of the cancellation, and say the communication from the airline since has been less than satisfactory. Read more: Families will never know how two Yorkshire divers died days apart in Greece Speaking to Grimsby Live, the couple said: “We were due to leave our resort at 6.30pm on August 28 to get our flight at 9.30pm, and at 6pm we received a message from a family friend to say there was a massive issue with air traffic control in England. So we checked our flight status and it told us that it was delayed until 9am the following morning. “We then contacted the taxi company to cancel our taxi to the airport, because we didn't want to spend the night in the airport with our four children.” From their hotel, Lee and Emma continued to check the status of their flight, and noticed the new flight time change from 9am the following morning to 7am, and then to 1am. “I rang the taxi back to say, 'actually I need a taxi again', but five minutes before the taxi collected us I refreshed the flight status and it came up that it had been cancelled,” Lee said. The family said they have not heard anything from EasyJet besides an email informing them their flight was cancelled (Image: Copyright Unknown) “The only thing we heard from EasyJet was when they sent an email five minutes prior to the original flight departure time to say the flight had been cancelled. “Thankfully we didn't go to the airport – we heard rumours that there were riots kicking off at the airport because people are stranded there without any information, so we made the choice that we would stay at the hotel because we have four children. “The hotel were absolutely fantastic and put us up for an extra night until we found out more information.” On Monday alone, 1,585 flights were cancelled and 345 axed on Tuesday, affecting hundreds of thousands of passengers. The decision to cancel flights came after an hours-long air traffic control system failure. Lee and Emma said they tried throughout the night to call EasyJet to find out what to do, but that they were repeatedly placed on hold and would then be hung up on altogether. They said: “We were ringing and ringing through the night but we kept being put on hold and then it would cut off completely. We tried contacting them through Facebook and Twitter, but had absolutely nothing back. All we had was that one email to say our flight had been cancelled. “In the email, it said you can go online and manage your booking so we went online to try and rebook onto another flight.” The cancellations were all due to a glitch in the air traffic control system (Image: Getty Images) But when the couple searched for another flight to Manchester Airport to book onto, they could not find any available – despite searching up until Sunday, September 10 – nearly one mon
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