Dilip Kuner
NEARLY 200 passengers were left stranded for over TEN HOURS at Ibiza Airport – with no beds, barely any food, and not even a bottle of water.
Vueling flight VLG1353, set to whisk travellers to Alicante at 9:55pm on Wednesday, quickly descended into chaos after a technical glitch forced passengers to disembark just before midnight – and then the waiting game began.
The airline promised a new departure early Thursday… but that never happened. Instead, families with babies, elderly passengers and even those needing special assistance were left sleeping on terminal floors, while Vueling handed out fast-food vouchers and told people to drink from airport fountains when they asked for water.
And forget about hotel rooms – the airline reportedly refused, claiming the delay wasn’t long enough to justify putting people up for the night.
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By dawn, tempers boiled over. The promised early departure was pushed back again, this time because the crew hadn’t shown up. The Airbus A320, finally airborne by 9am – nearly 12 hours late – landed in Alicante shortly after 10am.
But the real drama had erupted easlier at the Ibiza terminal, where furious passengers blocked the gate of another Vueling flight to Barcelona, chanting:
“No one leaves the island until we do!”
That standoff sparked a rapid response from Guardia Civil officers and airport security.
Passengers later slammed the airline’s ‘shameful’ handling of the fiasco – saying they were denied complaint forms, given contradictory info, and largely left in the dark, with ground staff scrambling to explain what Vueling couldn’t.
One exhausted traveller summed it up: “We were treated like cattle. Absolute disgrace.”
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