Around 100 travellers missed an easyJet flight from Milan after passport-control delays.

Queues, heat and missed connections

Passengers bound for Manchester from Milan’s Linate airport found themselves stuck in long passport-control lines on Sunday, April 12, after new EU entry checks created bottlenecks. The delays, which passengers say lasted up to three hours in some cases, meant that an 11:00 easyJet service left the airport without roughly 100 people who had arrived at the gate well before departure.

It was chaotic at times. People posted images and videos showing packed queues and travellers collapsing with heat-related illness, according to local reports and passengers who spoke to regional newspapers and the BBC.

Families, extras costs and hasty rebookings

Several people told reporters the disruption hit them in the pocket. Vicky Chapman, 26, from Pensby, said she, her partner Adam Hoijord, their five-year-old son Fredrik and other family members were among about 105 passengers left behind after the Manchester-bound flight departed. “We got to the airport with more than enough time,” Chapman told the Liverpool Echo. “We were passed from pillar to post for three hours and no-one helped us. It was so hot in the airport, people were vomiting and close to passing out.”

Families scrambled to find alternative routes home. Emily Benn, from Grimsby, said her party had to rebook on a flight into London Gatwick and now face around a £400 taxi to reach Manchester. The Express reported that another family spent about £520 on replacement flights and onward travel. Those are direct, out-of-pocket sums for people who’d planned a straightforward return from holiday.

Airline timing and operational limits

EasyJet has told passengers it was helping where it could, but it also said the delays were outside the airline’s control. Multiple accounts say the aircraft was held for almost an hour — 59 minutes in one telling — but ultimately had to leave when the crew approached the end of their permitted working hours.

The airline’s need to comply with crew-rest and duty-time rules is a hard constraint; crews can’t just be kept flying indefinitely.

Because crew hours were reaching their limit, the aircraft departed while many ticketed passengers were still queued at passport control. Passengers report being ushered back to arrivals and told to rebook at easyJet desks, where they faced limited options and extra expense.

Mastheads

What triggered the queues

The bottleneck followed the roll-out of the EU’s Entry/Exit System (EES), an electronic registration programme that replaces physical passport stamps for travellers to the Schengen area. Reports suggest the new checks caused passport-control systems to slow — and in some accounts the EES terminal wasn’t working properly, so slower manual checks had to be used instead. That pushed processing times up sharply at peak periods.

Airlines and border authorities are still adjusting to the new system, and that mismatch led to delays in this case. When they don’t, passengers lose. And those passengers often absorb the immediate cost.

Compensation, blame and the money angle

There’s an immediate financial trail: taxi fares, hotel rooms, new tickets and missed work or appointments. The Express said easyJet offered £12.25 in compensation to one passenger, a figure that passengers described as inadequate in the face of hundreds of pounds of added costs. Vicky Chapman said her family had to pay for an Airbnb while they waited — a direct charge she wasn’t expecting when they booked their holiday.

Some travellers tried other fixes. Adam Lomas, 33, from Wakefield, told reporters some passengers booked hotels while others travelled to alternative airports, including Pisa, in attempts to get home. Lomas said the airport and easyJet had spent hours arguing over who was to blame, leaving passengers to sort the financial fallout among themselves.

Wider implications for airlines and travellers

The episode shows how border-control changes can ripple through airline operations and passenger costs. Airlines operate tight schedules with limited slack. A delayed arrival, or a passport-processing meltdown, can cascade into missed flights or exhausted crews who can’t legally work longer. The airline’s exposure — for having to rebook passengers, provide accommodation or offer refunds — can be significant, but the immediate cash hit often falls on travellers.

Incidents like this can dent travellers' confidence in the short term. If people begin factoring in unexpected hotel or transfer costs, some may change carriers or routes — but we'd need data to know if that will actually happen. This appears to be an isolated incident so far; any long-term impact will hinge on whether such delays recur and on how quickly authorities and airlines improve coordination.

Who pays — and what passengers can expect

Who pays depends on what caused the delay, and passengers often have to chase reimbursement afterwards. When an airline is at fault for a delay, passengers often have clearer routes to compensation under EU and UK rules. When delays stem from border-control systems or government requirements, carriers frequently treat them as outside their direct responsibility.

That distinction matters. Passengers left to pay for hotels or new travel face the hard choice of chasing reimbursement later, often through customer-service queues. In the short term they must find cash to bridge the gap. In many of the accounts published by regional outlets, travellers paid for alternative flights, taxis and lodgings before contacting their insurer or the airline about reimbursement.

Calls for coordination

Passengers and consumer advocates will likely point to this weekend’s chaos as proof that airports, border authorities and airlines need better contingency plans when new systems are introduced. Where a system upgrade slows processing, additional staffing, temporary lanes or clearer prioritisation of departing flights can limit the damage. Without that, travellers face direct financial loss and airlines face reputational damage.

That said, the EES is intended to standardise entry checks across the EU and to speed processing once it’s fully embedded. But the transition period can be messy. For now, the problem is concrete: lines at passport control got so long that at least one flight departed without a full complement of passengers — and many of those passengers had to find and fund alternatives themselves.

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The Manchester-bound service was held for 59 minutes before departing as crew neared the end of their permitted working hours.

This article was created with AI assistance.