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DialAFlight Stems Travel Chaos in Wake of Ash Cloud

Dépèche transmise le 15 avril 2010 par PRNewswire

LONDON, April 15, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- Online travel firm DialAFlight is committed to helping passengers stranded in the UK get to their destination and find accommodation, following the volcanic eruption in Iceland which has brought northern European air traffic to a standstill.

Hundreds of flights were delayed as volcanic ash, 20, 000 ft up in the air, made its way across the skies of Ireland, Britain and Scandinavia.

British airspace was shut on Thursday between 12-6pm but it would appear that many planes may be grounded until tomorrow morning. According to a DialAFlight spokesman, crisis management has been going well:

"We have around 2700 passengers travelling today from various UK airports. We have spent the day rearranging flights and hotels for them. The majority we have managed to sort out, with only a handful of cancellations. We have also had calls from people at airports who had made their own bookings asking for us to help them out. Obviously we do whatever we can for them but our top priority has been to get our own customers sorted. This shows again the value of having experts making your travel arrangements."

The volcano responsible for the chaos lies under Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull glacier, which erupted on Wednesday, blowing a vast ash cloud east towards Scotland and Norway, before descending on the rest of Scandinavia and Britain. The major risks to aircraft, experts say, are engines becoming clogged and reduced visibility.

By Thursday morning, it was announced that no flights could go through the affected areas, which also include parts of Belgium and the Netherlands. Icelandic airports, which the cloud has left behind as it makes its way east, remain open.

Around 300 flights coming in and out of London's main airports were already cancelled prior to the airspace being officially closed, leaving the quarter-million passengers that use Gatwick and Heathrow every day with nowhere to go.

Flights from all over the world - including Hong Kong, Dubai, Paris and Athens - have been affected by the closed airspace in Europe.

DialAFlight says it is waiting on the Met Office to give the all clear for service to return to normal.

About DialAFlight

DialAFlight makes the travel arrangements for almost half a million people annually and is one of the travel industry's best performing and most consistently profitable firms, it has appeared in the Sunday Times UK Top 250 survey for several years. DialAFlight uniquely, guarantees that all phone calls during business hours (and that's up until 9pm at night) are answered live by one of its 350 experienced reservations staff in less than 5 secs. DialAFlight offer more than six million cheap flights to a wide range of destinations around the world including flights to Bangkok ( ) and cheap flights to Orlando ().

For more information please visit .

CONTACT: Contact: Karen Hart, DialAFlight, Sandpiper House, 39 QueenElizabeth Street, London, SE1 2BT, Tel: +44(0)207-962-9966.