Hundreds of passengers remain stranded following Friday’s global IT meltdown, which led to thousands of flight cancellations.
TUI was one of the worst affected tour operators, with some passengers who were due to fly home over the weekend delayed until Wednesday.
In an updated posted on its website yesterday, TUI apologised to passengers left waiting in resorts.
Its list of delayed flights include services from Dalaman to Bournemouth and Gatwick which have been rescheduled for 24 July.
Many more of TUI’s weekend flights to the UK have been rescheduled for today and tomorrow, 22 and 23 July.
Passengers disembarking the cruise ship Marella Explorer in Corfu on Friday say they were left at airport gates while flights took off without them, because they’d been told to stay on board the ship to await later transfers to the airport, which then didn’t arrive in time. Those who haven’t booked alternative flights themselves are still waiting to be flown home.
One passenger said : “We were on board Marella Explorer on Friday and were quite specifically told by Hotel Manager/Director, to wait to be called for flights. Stay on board and enjoy the facilities, that they would get us to the airport and our flights.
“By the time we were called and got on the coach it was almost impossible to get us to the airport, checked in, through security and to the gate before the plane left. We watched our plane take off with only 2/3rds of the passengers. How they got on board is still a mystery to me.”
TUI/Marella sent a message to stranded passengers on Saturday, to say: “We’re so sorry for the continuing disruption to your holiday and your planned flight home. We were severely impacted by the global IT outage yesterday and are working hard to recover our flying operation.
“We are however sorry to inform you that due to the scale of the disruption we will not be able to operate your flight back to the UK today. However we would like to reassure you that we will be providing you with a flight home.”
The message added local reps were working hard to find accommodation and passengers who had sourced their own hotel and/or flights should keep receipts and will be reimbursed ‘reasonable costs’.
“We absolutely understand this [is] not the end of your holiday that you would expect and apologies again for the impact this has had. We ask that you please bear with us while we work through the next steps,” the message added.
Flight data analysts Cirium said more than 8,000 flights were cancelled globally on Friday and Saturday due to an IT outage, caused by an update to malware detector CrowdStrike. By 4pm on Friday, almost 3,500 flights had been cancelled.
More than 400 flights in and out of the UK were grounded over the two days, and airline problems were compounded by thunderstorms over Europe over the weekend, which caused air traffic control (ATC) delays.
In an update posted on its website, easyJet said some of its Sunday morning flights were cancelled due to knock-on effect of weather-related ATC restrictions on Saturday.
However, Jet2 said it had no flight cancellations on Friday or over the weekend.
Travel Gossip has contacted TUI/Marella for a comment.