Weather spoils Christmas for thousands of travellers

Thousands of passengers due to fly away for Christmas are looking to their travel insurance for compensation this week after dozens of flights were cancelled due to the weather.

Budget airline easyJet (www.easyjet.com) was forced to ditch more than 150 flights from Gatwick and Luton airports earlier this week due to snow, freezing fog and ice.

Passengers flying with British Airways (www.ba.com) and Ryanair (www.ryanair.com) were also subjected to delays and cancellations. More than 200 passengers on a Ryanair flight from Stansted to Dinard were stuck on the tarmac for more four hours after snow blocked the runway.

Snow and ice have also caused chaos on UK roads while bad weather in northern France forced the cancellation of Eurostar (www.eurostar.com) services through the Channel Tunnel for three days. Eurostar services are now running, but with a backlog of more than 75,000 passengers those due to travel in the run up to Christmas are still suffering long delays.

Eurostar has announced an independent review to discover why its services were so badly disrupted by the bad weather and why it took 16 hours to evacuate passengers stuck on five trains in the Channel Tunnel over the weekend.

EasyJet said its service had also been badly disrupted by bad weather at other European airports, including Rome, Milan, Madrid and Paris.

Passengers due to fly with easyJet earlier this week were told to find alternative flights with other airlines, but many were unsuccessful as seats were either full or too expensive. Many were forced to cancel their Christmas getaways and return home, with the possibility of a travel insurance pay-out their only consolation.

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