Having their flight back to Hanoi from Frankfurt disrupted on Monday was a double whammy for nearly 30 Vietnamese passengers, as their visas had expired the same day, one such passenger has complained to Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper.

The Vietnam Airlines flight from Germany’s fifth-largest city to the Vietnamese capital had been delayed twice before the flag carrier eventually announced that it was canceled, Vu Van Ngoc, one of the passengers, said in an email to Tuoi Tre.

The flight had been slated for takeoff at 1:15 pm local time, and was delayed to 2:30 pm and then 4:00 pm before Vietnam Airlines announced the cancelation due to “technical issues.”

While other passengers were able to stay at a hotel to wait for an alternative flight on Tuesday, nearly 30 passengers had to spend the night at the terminal as their expired visas did not allow them to leave the airport, Ngoc said.

The exhausted passengers had to sleep wherever they could, from the floor to chairs inside restaurants.

“The weather was cold but there was nowhere to bathe or get warm,” the email reads.  “Some elderly people could not sleep on the cold floor, and suffered elevated blood pressure.”

Ngoc said no one from Vietnam Airlines has arrived to apologize to the passengers. The airline only granted a EUR40 (US$50.8) voucher to cover two meals for each passenger, but provided no instruction on how to use them, he added.

“Four old passengers did not even receive the vouchers and had to buy meals with their own money,” Ngoc wrote.

Among the stranded passengers was a group of 21 people who attended a workshop organized by the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Germany.

Huynh Le Lap, one of the workshop participants, said besides the airline, the event organizer is also to blame for the incident.

“The workshop ran for a month from September 14 to October 12, but the organizer only advised us to apply for a visa valid until October 12,” Lap said.

“If the organizer had taken into account unexpected incidents that could occur and asked us to extend the visa application date for two or three days, at least we would have been able to stay at the hotel instead of the airport.”

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