A fashion influencer has shared her family’s nightmare ordeal of being stranded in Mallorca airport for 30 hours as they desperately tried to leave the island amid a hurricane-force storm.
Evie Clark, who was trying to get back to London Gatwick, posted a video on TikTok capturing the sequence of events that left her family exhausted after several delays and cancellations at Palma de Mallorca airport.
The forceful storms hit the island of Majorca at around 11am on Sunday August 27 and, within an hour, there were 84 incidents, leading to thousands of British holidaymakers scrambling to get home.
Evie, known as @evie on the social app, uploaded the video which has since amassed a whopping 2M views, 277,000 likes and almost 2,500 comments from fellow Brits who both empathised and dismissed Evie’s frustrating experience.
The two-minute eleven-second video – captioned ‘What was meant to be a 2 hour flight from Mallorca to London Gatwick ended up being 30 hours’ – began with the influencer recording herself laying on the cold floor of the airport.
She said: ‘I’m currently lying on the floor of Palma de Mallorca Airport because they delayed our flight by ten hours. Little did I know that was the least of our worries. I woke up from a nap to the airport flooding – like, a way to start the day off.’
Evie continued: ‘As compensation, they gave us 9 euro food vouchers. When we went to the café, they said, “Oops, sorry, the kitchen’s closed”, – it was 2:00pm.’
After lying on the airport floor for nine hours, the family were moved upstairs to the boarding gates, ans they presumed they were about to finally get on a plane.
Fifteen minutes later, they were told by the airline that the flight was cancelled and rearranged for the following morning – but all passengers were promised a hotel room for the night.
Evie continued: ‘We went back through passport control to get our bags. After about an hour of waiting, I finally spot mine. I’m so excited, I pull it off, but something just looks and feels different.
‘My bag was drenched through. Everything was wet: my book, my journal, my bags, socks, pants, everything. Someone said that they left our bags out in the rain.’
Showing an extensive queue to ask about hotel details, the influencer said: ‘This just puts into perspective how long everything took.
‘After a lot more waiting around, they finally said that we had a hotel for the night. We headed straight there with about five or six other families.
‘But, when we arrived, they said there were never actually any rooms for us, so we had to find somewhere else to stay. The room that they booked for us doesn’t exist.’