What should have been a fun girls’ trip has turned into the “holiday from hell” for a group of friends who are stranded in Spain.

The four were expected to fly back with EasyJet to Gatwick in the early hours of yesterday (August 29) from Marbella but their flight was delayed seven hours before they were due to board.

They then got a notification a few hours later to say the flight was further delayed and would not be leaving until 11am – almost 11 hours after the original departure time.

Easyjet said its teams were working around the clock to help passengers get home as soon as possible.

Chloe Linsdell, of Rochester, said: “We all needed to find somewhere to stay overnight but it was not the end of the world as we could all still get home.

“But within half an hour of being told it was further delayed we were told the flight was cancelled completely and the next available flight was the following Tuesday.”

Many UK holidaymakers are stranded overseas after around 2,000 flights were cancelled because of an air traffic control (ATC) failure.

Bosses have since said an “unusual piece of data” caused the widespread disruption which led flights to and from UK airports to be restricted on Monday (August 28).

The fault prevented flight plans from being processed automatically, meaning manual checks were required.

Aviation analytics company Cirium said 64 flights due to serve UK airports today (August 30) were cancelled as of 9am, as the issue continued to have a knock-on effect with aircraft and crews in the wrong position.

There were 1,585 flights cancelled on Monday, while 345 were axed yesterday.

Chloe, who was only meant to be in the country for the bank holiday weekend, said the group was not contacted by the holiday company following the cancellation but when they did get through claimed they were advised to drive or get the bus home.

“There is no bus that goes from the south of Spain to Medway,” she added. “Nor could we do the 28-hour drive home. EasyJet has given us no reasonable options.”

The emergency services worker – who was on holiday with friends Maisie Stanhope, Georgia Mckeogh and Chloe Coleman – said they were eventually told they could stay in accommodation which was three-star or less.

But as many other passengers were also in the same situation, the only place they could find was in Malaga – an hour's drive away and £100 taxi fare.

Chloe added: “It is literally now the holiday from hell. It has been horrendous.

“We only budgeted for four days and have had to spend almost £1,000 extra to get home. We are very limited on what we can do as we are so short on money.

“We have been on the beach but do not have much money to use for food. What was originally a girls’ summer trip has turned into a financial disaster.”

The four, who are all 23 or 24 years old, have managed to book flights home across the week but will be travelling separately with either Transavia Airlines or Austrian Airlines.

One will be flying to Brussels with an eight-hour stopover before getting on the Eurostar to London, another is flying to Austria and then to London Heathrow and the other two are flying via Amsterdam before heading back to Gatwick.

“It has just been absolutely chaos but we just need to get home,” Chloe added.

Easyjet is advising anyone who had to book their own hotels or flights that they will be reimbursed.

A spokesman for easyJet said: “The impact of the ATC systems failure on Monday was significant, affecting tens of thousands of customers.

“Our teams have been working around the clock since then to help our customers as quickly as possible.

“As this is one of the busiest weeks of the year this is very challenging however we are providing hotel accommodation where it is available and operating additional repatriation flights as well as larger aircraft on many routes.

“While this was outside of our control, we are sorry for the difficulty this caused Ms Mckeogh and we are in touch with her to help the group return home as soon as possible.”