‘Baggage reclaim was pandemonium’: passengers hit by airport IT chaos recount their ordeals

More than 2,000 flights have been cancelled after an air traffic control system failure that has thrown airports across the UK into chaos. Nats, the air traffic control provider, fixed the problem within hours on Tuesday, but hundreds of thousands of passengers were hit by further delays and cancellations on Wednesday.Martin Rolfe, the chief executive of Nats, has been given a week to report back on the reasons for the technical failure.People affected by the disruption talked about their frustration during the two days of chaos – from hours spent stuck on planes waiting to take off, to spending the night sleeping on the floor of Heathrow airport. Here are some of their experiences:‘People were sleeping on every spare inch of flooring’Daniel Garrick, 32, a software engineer, was scheduled to leave Heathrow on a flight to Austin, Texas, on Tuesday. After waiting for seven hours on the asphalt, “we were released from the plane only to find Heathrow in absolute chaos”, he says.“My baggage was lost, and British Airways employees were nowhere to be found. People were sleeping on every spare inch of flooring, in arrivals and at security.”Luggage in Terminal 5 of Heathrow airport on Tuesday.Baggage reclaim was “pandemonium”, he says. “All the screens just said it was closed. You couldn’t tell where your baggage was supposed to be.“I found some other Texans going back to Austin on our flight. Someone had an air tag in their luggage and we figured out that the bags were still on the plane. Eventually, there was some announcement where we were told they were not going to finish getting all the bags off the planes tonight, so we’re just going to have to leave.” At the time of writing, Garrick still hadn’t retrieved his case with a week’s worth of clothes.Garrick’s airline, British Airways, sent a mass email apology at about 9pm on Tuesday. “Then in the app, it automatically rebooked me for a flight tomorrow [Thursday] morning, 48 hours after my first flight. Luckily I’m staying with a friend of a friend in Surrey. It was over £100 just for the Uber here.”‘We were left to our own devices’Melanie Thompson on her train from Edinburgh.Melanie Thompson, 71, an interdisciplinary artist, was on a 14-hour flight returning from her performance at a mixed media festival with her son in Tokyo on Tuesday when she was told the flight would not land in London. “We were exhausted. About 40 minutes before we arrived, the pilot very politely said, ‘because of IT problems and disruptions at Heathrow, we are going to have to divert to Edinburgh’.“There was a big silence. About 20 minutes later, he said, ‘we were hoping we could refuel and then take you on to Heathrow. But we can’t do that, so we would like you to stay in Edinburgh tonight’. Then we were left to our own devices to find travel and accommodation for the night.”“We suddenly found ourselves in Edinburgh with nowhere to stay because all the hotels and Airbnbs had been filled up,” she said.“We finally found a flat for £500, paid for the taxi to get there and stayed the night there last night.”Thompson spoke to the Guardian on her train journey from Edinburgh to London as there were no flights available on Wednesday.‘It’s Kafkaesque’Thomas Reilly, 55, was due to fly with BA from Marrakech to Gatwick on Tuesdayand then on to Marseille, where he lives and works as a freelance geopolitical adviser. It was only when he got to the airport that he was told his flight was cancelled.“I am currently stuck in Morocco,” says Reilly. “I did not receive any information from BA about the disruption before getting to the airport.”He says that, once at the airport, BA staff were helpful and courteous but he has been left with no option but to book a hotel to stay an extra two nights in Marrakech – at his own expense (BA staff at the airport did tell him he could ‘pay and reclaim’ for his hotel expenses).He has been trying to rearrange his journey, attempting to cancel with BA and fly directly to Marrakech through a different airline.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe says: “BA’s customer services operator is not taking calls as ‘the lines are too busy’. There is no email address. And their chatbot cannot help. It is Kafkaesque.”Reilly says he has worked out “alternative travel arrangements, namely to fly direct from Marrakech to Marseille on Thursday 10 September” but he wanted to get his “refund agreed first before outlaying more money on the replacement flight.”When Reilly got through to someone at BA, he says the airline told him they “would not refund the Heathrow-Marseille ticket”. “It’s absurd,” Reilly adds.A spokesperson for British Airways said: “Since yesterday, we’ve rebooked more than 60,000 customers to travel on alternative flights, getting them to their destinations as quickly as we can. Today, we’ve been able to operate almost 80% of our schedule across our whole network.“We know this has been a very challenging and frustrating time for our customers, and we’re incredibly sorry for the experience they’ve endured because of an issue that has been entirely out of our control.”‘We have also lost two days of our trip’Keith Sessions, 74, a computer engineer from Cobham, Surrey, and his wife were due to fly from Heathrow to Tahiti via LA on Tuesday with a five-hour stopover at LAX airport.For the first leg of their journey, they were to fly Virgin, but once on the plane it was clear there were problems.He says the pilot informed them there were delays. Five-and-a-half hours later, with the plane still on the asphalt, the pilot announced that the flight had been cancelled.Keith Sessions was due to fly Virgin on the first leg of the trip to Tahiti. Photograph: Anthony Upton/PASessions says they were not offered a meal in that time, “only water, soft drinks and courtesy snacks”.The couple decided to return home via taxi and their flights were auto-rebooked. They will now fly out on Thursday with an 11-hour stopover at LAX airport. They will arrive in Tahiti at 5.30am on Friday.“The 11-hour stopover is not ideal,” says Sessions. “We have also lost two days of our trip and had to spend an extra £340 when you factor in extra cabs to and from the airport and the cost to reserve seating on our flight. Communication from Virgin has been very poor, diabolical.”A Virgin Atlantic spokesperson said: “We’d like to sincerely apologise to our customers for the widespread disruption … We know how frustrating delays and changes to travel plans can be and appreciate our customers’ patience.”