A young couple is out nearly £800 after an EasyJet flight left them stranded at Milan Linate Airport without warning. They had arrived three hours early. The plane left anyway.
The ordeal is one of the most striking personal accounts to come out of a chaotic mass abandonment on April 12, when LADbible reported that EasyJet flight EJU5420 departed for Manchester with only 34 of its 156 booked passengers on board. The remaining 122 were stuck in hours-long biometric queues under the EU’s newly launched Entry/Exit System (EES), which became mandatory across 29 European countries on April 10, 2026.
What happened at the airport
The EES requires British travelers to submit facial scans, fingerprints, and passport data when entering and leaving the Schengen zone. At Milan Linate that morning, passport control only opened at 9:15am with just two officers and a single working biometric machine, even though 16 machines were available at the airport. Passengers who arrived on time were initially turned away from the line because the gate for the Manchester flight had not yet been announced, while other flights were allowed through.
Once the gate opened, the queue moved at a crawl. By the time most passengers were close to boarding, the flight was already gone.
“At 11:25 while we were all getting close to the gate, we were told that the flight has just left,” the unnamed man told LADbible. “We were then not being told what to do and stood in a queue full of people who are trying to get on different flights.”
EasyJet later said it held the plane for nearly an hour before crew safety regulations on maximum operating hours forced it to depart. The airline maintained the delays were “outside of our control” and blamed border authorities for failing to deploy enough resources.
The couple’s £800 nightmare
The man told LADbible that he and his girlfriend had to borrow money from his parents just to get home. Replacement flights from a different airport cost them close to £600 alone, and with a hotel, travel, and food on top, the total climbed to nearly £800.
EasyJet, he said, offered no compensation and claimed the responsibility sat entirely with the airport. He disputed the airline’s claim that it waited 50 minutes after departure time, saying staff told passengers to leave the queue because the plane had already left. The airline, he added, told the couple a hotel would be arranged for them if their next flight was days away. It never happened.
“When explaining our situation to these companies it feels like we are not being listened to and we just get sent in circles,” he said.
He wasn’t the only one left scrambling. Some passengers took connecting flights through Luxembourg. Others traveled to Pisa to catch alternative routes. EasyJet did not offer full refunds to those who missed the flight, reimbursing only the tax portion of the ticket. The next available EasyJet flight from Milan Linate to Manchester was five days away.
Travel insurance has also been of little help. Insurers want written confirmation from EasyJet that the flight was canceled, but since the plane did depart with 34 people on board, it technically was not canceled, leaving stranded passengers caught in a coverage gap.
The human cost beyond the couple
The situation was especially difficult for more vulnerable passengers. The man told LADbible that a family traveling with a child with autism was left in a panic not knowing what to do. Two 17-year-olds, one of them sick, were also among those left to fend for themselves. The Hounslow Herald reported that some travelers at the airport fainted or became unwell while waiting in the three-hour queues. Max Hume, a 56-year-old teacher from Leeds, described the experience as “awful, just a mess” and spent £1,800 traveling home through Luxembourg with his family.
It is not an isolated incident. Similar EES-related disruptions have been reported at airports across Europe, including in Spain, and airports like Paris Charles de Gaulle and Amsterdam Schiphol have seen comparable queue failures during the rollout. Airlines for Europe have called on border authorities to be allowed to suspend EES checks when queues reach dangerous levels.
The timing is particularly concerning as the peak summer travel season approaches. Travel experts warn the “teething problems” could get worse before they get better, and passengers are being urged to allow significantly more time at European airports, even though, as the Milan case shows, arriving three hours early is no guarantee of making it home.
It is not just airport encounters leaving travelers flustered. A woman recently went viral after she accepted a drink from a stranger at the airport, only for a surprising intercom announcement to cut in. And airports have been the backdrop for other unexpected moments too, like a restaurant that started adding a “kitchen appreciation fee” to customer bills.
