Once again we see utter chaos abroad at the moment, little or no help from one of the most shambolic industries on the planet.

People left to make their own arrangements due to the lack of funding roper organisation by travel companies and local authorities.

This mirrors my own past experiences.

I once had a situation where I was on a family holiday in Menorca and on checking in at the airport ( and us picking the slowest moving queue ) we were the last people checked in, there were 5 of us in total and 3 of them were my then fairly young kids.

When we got to the desk, the check in lady who’d been speaking perfect English suddenly reverted to Spanish and started jabbering away.

She eventually shook her head and held 4 fingers up and pointed at me and shook her head.

It turned out that there were only 4 seats left on the plane , she then told me that I would have to stay behind and that the next available seat was 7 days away…….she wouldn’t budge and I was getting more irate and started shouting.

I was threatened with arrest at this point.

I then ran around the airport looking for a representative of our holiday company to help and there wasn’t a single one on site.

Luckily I found another companies reps and two of them accompanied me to check in to try and sort it out.

They liaised with check in staff and told me that what had happened was that a member of a holiday company staff had been alllowed a last minute seat on our plane leaving me shafted!

After more negotiations this person was moved up to sit in the flight cabin to then free up my seat.

Time was then so tight that we had to run through the airport with three kids and got on the plane just as they were preparing to pull the ladder away.

Much tut tutting from other passengers who then blamed us for the flight delay.

I was aghast at how the holiday companies are willing to throw customers under the bus in this way.

In those days I didn’t have much money and faced being stuck in Menorca for days or a week with almost no cash and nobody gave a toss.

In even more dire circumstances this week a lot of them are AWOL again……simply not good enough.