Family-of-six stranded in Egypt and forced to pay out £6,000 for hotel after flight home cancelled

A family-of-six stranded in Egypt after their flight home was cancelled due to the air traffic control meltdown say they have been forced to fork out an extra £6,000 for a hotel for their enforced stay.

Lee and Emma, from Grimsby, fear their whopping outlay won't be reimbursed - because they're in a five-star hotel and their airline insisted it should be no more than three star accommodation.

The family travelled to Hurghada in Egypt with their four children, aged 15, 14, 12 and 8, on Saturday, August 12. As they waited for their taxi to the airport for their trip home on Monday, August 28 - which was also Emma's 40th birthday - they checked their flight status to discover that their plane to Manchester Airport had been delayed until the next day.

Try MEN Premium for FREE by clicking here for no ads, fun puzzles and brilliant new features.

Soon after, the family then discovered their flight home had been cancelled like hundreds of others, leaving them stranded. They say it wasn't until five minutes before their original flight time that they received an email from EasyJet to inform them of the cancellation, and say the communication from the airline since has been less than satisfactory.

Speaking to Grimsby Live, the couple said: "We were due to leave our resort at 6.30pm on August 28 to get our flight at 9.30pm, and at 6pm we received a message from a family friend to say there was a massive issue with air traffic control in England. So we checked our flight status and it told us that it was delayed until 9am the following morning.

"We then contacted the taxi company to cancel our taxi to the airport, because we didn't want to spend the night in the airport with our four children."

From their hotel, Lee and Emma