Airline overbooks flight, splits up family and makes children fly across the Atlantic separately

Robbie and Sarah Kitchen expected their family summer holiday to Florida to be a dream trip after Covid and a health scare.

The family of five from Dundonald in Northern Ireland had originally planned to visit the Sunshine State in 2020, but Covid put paid to the plan. Then Robbie was diagnosed with prostate cancer and spent months undergoing treatment before being given the all clear.

Finally, by June 2022 they were packed and ready to fly from their local airport, Belfast City. They had a confirmed booking on Aer Lingus to London Heathrow, with a transfer to Virgin Atlantic for the flight to Orlando.

But the Irish airline oversold the first leg – and, despite protests from the parents, insisted that two of the children should be driven over the Irish border and flown 4,000 miles on their own.

The first the family knew of any problem was at check-in at the Northern Ireland airport.

The ground staff separated their daughter Molly (16) and elder son Zack (18) and asked them to wait at a separate desk.

The parents and their youngest child, three-year-old Charlie, were given their boarding passes. But as Sarah Kitchen told the BBC Ulster programme On Your Behalf, ground staff said there was no room for the older children.

“They said, ‘I’m sorry, the flight is overbooked and there is no room for your other two children. We’ll just put them on the next flight.”

Ms Kitchen explained that the next flight would arrive after the onward connection to Florida had left.

“They said, ‘That’s just how it is. There’s nothing we can do.”

Under European air passengers’ rights rules, airlines are legally obliged to ask for volunteers to travel on a later flight before they deny boarding to passengers who need to fly as booked. Aer Lingus did not do this.

“I was in shock and I was trying to process what we could do,” Ms Kitchen said. “The children were distressed and they just couldn’t believe what was happening. So I said can we at least swap and leave one adult with one child and then one of us go with two children?

“They said, ‘No, if you do that, you’re voluntarily giving up a seat and that also invalidates your seat onward to America’.

“I tried to argue our point and the people behind in the queue could see how distressed…