Jetstar flights cancelled, leaving 4,000 passengers stranded overseas for up to a week

theguardian.com:

Mass flight cancellations have left 4,000 Jetstar passengers stranded or forced to cancel trips, with the carrier only able to offer flights a week later in many cases.

Many have reported being left in Bali well beyond their planned return date without access to medication, or being forced to lose wages because they could not return home in time to work.

Jason Hayes was treated to “breakfast in bed” on Father’s Day – the breakfast was a block of chocolate and a packet of chips, and the bed was a row of seats at Perth airport.

Hayes, his wife, Roxi Heywood Hayes, and the couple’s autistic seven-year-old son, who also has ADHD, were supposed to arrive home in Newcastle from their holiday in Bali at the end of August. Instead they were stuck in Indonesia for a week, with medication running out.

Thousands of Australians were still stranded in Bali early this week after Jetstar cancelled multiple flights. Eight return services between Melbourne or Sydney and Denpasar have been cancelled since 1 September, in addition to a number of delays of up to 24 hours.

Jetstar said about 4,000 travellers were affected, but a spokesperson for the company said “the majority of impacted passengers have now been re-accommodated and our teams are working hard to find the remaining 200 or so impacted passengers an alternative option”. Guardian Australia understands that number was down to 180 as of Tuesday afternoon.

Many travellers in Bali and in Thailand too, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, are facing delays of more than a week in order to get an alternate flight home.

But the airline denied the Herald report that it had lost half its long-haul aircraft fleet to engineering issues.

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