A family have told how they boarded three different planes before finding out their TUI holiday to Crete was cancelled less than an hour before they are due to board their fourth flight. Ian McStein was hoping to fly to Crete for two weeks with this family on May 29.
As they were flying from Manchester Airport, and has heard the latest chaos tales, the family arrived four hours early for their flight. The dad-of-four claims they faced long waits and moved onto another flight before having to take a taxi home and return the next day.
The scenario escalated when the McSteins holiday was cancelled because there weren’t enough seats on the plane. However, the 43-year-old states that pictures on a passenger WhatsApp group showed this wasn’t the case and there were more than enough empty spaces for his family, Echo reports.
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When seeking a refund, Ian was initially told he couldn’t have one despite the application making progress in the background, and On The Beach said he would have to wait “another month, maybe eight weeks”. Ian said: “We got there four hours early, we’d heard about the queues.
“The first plane we couldn’t fly on, don’t know why. The second plane we couldn’t fly on, it didn’t have bottled water. And then next, we sat on the runway for three-and-a-half hours.
“The pilot didn’t have enough air time, enough flying hours. This was 2am or 3am in the morning. We’re waiting to get through security, it took two hours. In the end the police had to come, not to calm us down, no-one was kicking off, it was broken (to us) by the police - there were no Tui reps whatsoever apart from the police - they told us our flight time was the next day at 12.45pm.
“We got there at 9am. Tui passengers had a special gate to go and check in. We were all pretty happy to be fair that we had a special gate, we all got through check-in and security pretty fast, went down to the gate. Most of the passengers went down to the gate, we were all made up. We were flying on a Tui Dreamliner.
“It was 45 minutes before boarding, 16 passengers got a text message to say ‘we are really sorry for the disruption to your journey, the aircraft is smaller than originally scheduled, which resulted in us having to remove some of our customers from today’s flight. We are sorry to confirm you are one of these’.”
Ian asked to speak to a manager, as there were no reps available, who insisted the plane was too small but “went red in the face” when Ian said how many spare seats the flight had. Ian said: “He went red in the face and said ‘there’s been a mess up here’.
“We got cancelled because there ‘wasn’t enough room’ on that plane. There were 30 (empty) seats.”
A spokesperson for TUI said: “We would like to apologise to Mr McStein and his family. The aircraft originally scheduled for flight TOM2744 from Manchester to Heraklion on Sunday, May 29 was changed at the last minute due to operational issues, impacting a small number of customers.
“We contacted everyone as soon as we became aware of the change, offering the option to cancel their holiday for a full refund. We understand how frustrating and disappointing this will have been and are very sorry for the inconvenience caused.”
An On The Beach spokesperson said: "We're sorry to hear about Mr McStein's experience following the late cancellation of his TUI flight. We have spoken to Mr McStein and we have offered him a full refund in line with EU regulations.”
