FURIOUS air passengers were hundreds of pounds out of pocket after Ryanair wrongly told them their flights from Bournemouth Airport had been cancelled.

Poole resident Stephen Gray moved swiftly to book alternative flights after seeing the word CANCELLED displayed across his bookings to Tenerife.

At the bottom of his confirmation it offered the option of a refund.

So Mr Gray quickly booked flights from Bournemouth with the airline Tui.

Hours later it was revealed that the Ryanair flight had not been cancelled and a web glitch had caused the confusion. But when Mr Gray asked for a refund, he was told he could not have one because the flight is going ahead as planned.

Mr Gray, his wife Lisa, and mother-in-law Barbara Tite are travelling to Tenerife in November.

He told the Daily Echo: “My mother-in-law has a place in Tenerife so she is going ahead of us and we are going to catch her up when we get holiday from work.

“Our holidays are already booked with our employers so I thought it would be good to get in quickly with alternative flights because we can’t go at any other time. I paid around £700 for the flights but through I would get back the £550 I had already paid to Ryanair to go towards the cost.

“This was supposed to be a cheap holiday but it definitely hasn’t turned out that.

“We’ve now paid more than £1,200 and have two flights each in both directions.”

Mr Gray, who works for Tapper Funeral Services, added: “

I even suggested that they give us a credit instead because we fly quite regularly but they wouldn’t even do that. I’ve flown with Ryanair many times and never had any problems before but this seems very unfair.”

Ryanair said in a statement: “This flight showed as unavailable for two hours due to a server issue, which was quickly resolved. A member of our customer service team has contacted this customer to resolve the issue directly and we apologise for any inconvenience.”