Bank Holiday weekend chaos at UK ports and airports

Travellers hoping to get away to foreign destinations for the long Bank Holiday weekend in the UK have been hit with a wave of chaos this Friday, May 26.

At Manchester Airport, passengers faced lengthy queues to pass through the check-in desks to board their flights, according to mirror.co.uk.

An IT failure yesterday, Thursday 25, caused dozens of British Airways flights to be cancelled at Heathrow Airport. This has subsequently had a knock-on effect on today’s flights.

As a result, over the two days, a total of 170 flights are expected to be cut by the airline, affecting around 16,000 passengers.

The situation at the facility is not helped by the fact that the security workers affiliated with the Unite union are currently in the middle of a pay dispute and carrying out industrial action.

“While the vast majority of our flights continue to operate today, we have cancelled some of our short-haul flights from Heathrow due to the knock-on effect of a technical issue that we experienced yesterday”, a spokesperson for BA told the news outlet.

They added: “We’ve apologised to customers whose flights have been affected and offered them the option to rebook to an alternative flight with us or another carrier, or request a refund”.

Massive queues were reported from early in the morning at the Port of Dover as people tried to catch cross-channel ferries. Tailbacks are said to extend to the outskirts of the town, with many lorries among those forced to spend long hours waiting.

Similar scenes last Easter led to a critical incident being declared by the authorities. Despite arriving in what they thought would be sufficient time, angry drivers ended up missing their boats, which had already sailed by the time they reached the front of the line.