Young women turned away from Flybe flight say they were ‘treated like terrorists’

A group of young British women who were denied boarding from a UK-bound flight and had to spend the night sleeping in the airport said they were “treated like terrorists” by the airline.

The four young university students were booked onto Flybe flight BE110 to Birmingham from Amsterdam, where they had been at a weekend festival.

Video footage of the incident posted on Twitter by the sister of Chloe Williams, one of the passengers, shows the women being denied boarding from their flight home. The footage has since gone viral, with almost 30,000 likes.

Flybe says the women were refused boarding because its third-party ground service agents felt “threatened by the aggressive behaviour and language used towards them by this group of passengers”.

It’s not clear exactly what constituted the “aggressive behaviour”.

Chloe told The Independent that the group was first in the queue for the delayed flight, but were asked to stand aside by gate agents as their seat numbers hadn’t yet been called.

She then claims the group were asked to go to the back of the queue, and then stand aside again. When everybody else had boarded, she says a gate agent told her that the group wasn’t allowed onboard because of their “aggressive behaviour”.

She says that the group acted on all instructions from airport staff and instead were subject to a “barrage of insults” from the gate agents.

In the footage posted by Chloe’s sister, an airport gate agent can be heard saying “I feel disgust”.

In a statement, the airline claims that the footage “served to misinterpret the full conversation” and that the agent was “disgusted by their behaviour and aggressive attitude”.

It added: “There was no intention for this to be communicated or received as a personal insult to any of the passengers involved.”

The four women, who are between 19 and 21 years old, then had to spend the night in the airport.

“We’re young women in a foreign country,” said Chloe. “We felt vulnerable and helpless.”

Eventually, the group took a Eurostar home instead.

Flybe, which was taken over by Virgin Atlantic earlier this year, said it had concluded its investigation into the incident and “stands by its decision in having refused boarding to the passengers involved because of their disruptive behaviour”. It added that the customer relations team was in contact with the passengers, something which Chloe disputes.

“Flybe has taken this allegation extremely seriously and investigated it as a matter of urgency. We expect all our customers at all times to be treated with respect and courtesy by our staff which includes our third party agents. If at any time we believe that this has been compromised, then we would not hesitate to take the necessary steps to rectify it.

“The safety and security of our passengers and crew is Flybe’s number one priority and, as such, we have a zero tolerance policy with any form of disruptive behaviour that might in any way compromise this.”